Shirt Fiction by Gary Percesepe

I’d see Gabrielle once a week at the small literary magazine where we worked. The magazine had a good reputation. Thousands of hopeful writers sent their short stories to a post office box downtown. Gabrielle logged them in. The managing editor scanned the pile for names she recognized—writers we’d published previously, like T.C. Boyle, James Purdy, Gordon Lish—and for “agented work.” The rest was slush. The slush was stood upright in two large boxes in the far corner of the magazine’s one room office. There it would sit until one of the “readers” would take home a pile. Gabrielle and I were readers.

One day I read a story that knocked me out. The author had no credits. Straight from the slush, wrapped in a plain brown envelope, the story was about two lonely and alienated teenaged kids who are surprised one morning to find each other. A story I’d heard a thousand times. But it was the way the story was told—full of feeling, accurate, without a trace of condescension, right as rain. It filled the heart. I called Gabrielle.

We made a picnic in the park. I read the story out loud. Toward the end, the boy and girl meet at the high school, at first light. There is the sound of a lawn mower in the middle distance, and the smell of fresh cut grass. They are seated in silence on the steps of the school. The girl raises her shirt.

I finished reading. Silence, then Gabrielle leaned forward and kissed me. My hands were in her shirt, climbing, when she pulled it over her head.

About the author:

Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at the Mississippi Review (now Rick Magazine) and serves on the Board of Advisors at Fictionaut. His short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, interviews, literary and film criticism, and articles in philosophy and religion have been widely published. He studied with William H. Gass and T.C. Boyle, and just completed his second novel, Leaving Telluride. His first novel, an epistolary novel written with Susan Tepper, is called What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G, and is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press in the fall of 2010.