Issue 4: Fall 2017

fiction

Red Peppers

Sarah Key

After Pete died and Beth had to move east to live with her daughter's family, she sold almost everything she owned. Not that she wanted to, but there just wasn't enough space in their home. Beth only had a few good pieces anyway, a cherry curio at the end of the hall filled with ceramic plates and Pete's oldest theology books, and a dining room set large enough to seat a crowd. Beth hated giving them up, but that's what happened to her life.

Beth kept the desk, a solid oak roll-top from her “college days” in seminary school, where she was never officially enrolled but stayed for five years reciting prayers, attending daily Mass, and distributing communion to the elders inside a terminal wing of a nearby Catholic hospital. She packed her bedding and linens into a leather suitcase, because Clare, her daughter, preferred cheap cotton sheets and fabric that needed no ironing. It wasn't the way she had raised her, but Beth knew better than to tell her child what to do anymore, especially while living in her house.

Clare traveled west for Pete's funeral. Her husband, Kenneth, stayed home with their son in North Carolina. The community at Saint Agnes Seminary was in a hurry to turn over the house to a new resident deacon before the spring semester began. No matter Pete and Beth had lived there twenty-four years, that Beth had their wives in for coffee or brandy countless times, or that she had kept up the home as a reflection of the school and its parish. Beth was out without so much as a question to how she might get by. She never asked Clare if she could move in with her, and Clare never actually offered either. Clare stood in the hallway studying both familiar and unfamiliar framed prints of Agnes and the Virgin Mary, arms folded with her father's hard jaw, and said, “You're going to have to part with this big furniture.”

When they picked up Beth from the airport in Durham, Kenneth was not there. Her grandson, Stephen, hid behind his Clare’s legs as they waited for her bags to slide around the belt. Beth had bought him a stuffed beagle from the airport gift shop and attempted to give it to him, but Stephen clutched Clare's waist and asked, “Why is she so fat?” Beth didn't try to give him the beagle again, and when she saw Clare stroking his black hair instead of reprimanding him, Beth wanted to fly right back to Saint Agnes, house or no house, and walk the quiet winter paths around campus.

Clare put Beth in what her family called “the back room.” It was a small office at the end of the hallway with no closet, a single window, hardwood floors, and a daybed with groaning springs. (Stephen, one evening, commented on how much louder those bed springs sounded since Beth began sleeping there. He said he could hear those bed springs from the living room even with the television on.) Beth kept most of her belongings put away and her clothes in a drawer under the daybed. She didn't complain. Her roll-top desk wasn't the same type of wood as the floors in the back room, and Clare wanted to sell it but Beth would be black and blue before turning the desk over to some junk dealer.

Beth didn't have much to do with Kenneth. Clare and Stephen were all they had in common, so the two said little to each other. If they were ever alone in a room, it fell to Beth to start a conversation. She would mention the tree at the end of the property and how it looked during winter, or that maybe they could all spend more time together with the horses and build a bonfire one evening out back, or she'd bring up Stephen's unusually silent, wraith-like nature. Kenneth would respond in one or two words. He rarely looked at Beth; he wanted to pretend she wasn't there. Most times, when Kenneth was home and not traveling for his job as a quality control manager, Beth kept quiet and listened to where he went in the house so she could be in a different room.

She asked Kenneth for one thing. Beth wanted a piece of the yard, a patch near an abandoned cottage behind the house, where the sun touched the grass through midday. She thought she could plant a garden there.

Spring arrived later than usual that year, but Beth still spent much of her time outdoors to stay out of their way. The cold reminded her of Pete's hands and how he was always rubbing them together, how they made little to no sound, because his hands were so soft from years of work at Saint Agnes. She walked with the horses in their pasture and noticed feral cats wandering through the divots, stealthy and curious about her and what she was doing there. She and Pete always had a house cat or two at Saint Agnes. Pete was the type of man who enjoyed cats, especially manx or hairless breeds, because they were different.

Clare bought cans of tuna for Beth on her weekly trips to the grocery store in town, and Beth allowed her daughter to believe she had been eating them for lunch. She was able to convince two skinny, orange cats to come around the cottage, and after a few weeks, they let Beth touch the fur along their knobbly spines. Clare never said anything, though Beth felt sure that her daughter had caught on to what she was doing in the fields.

It turned out Kenneth had delicate sinuses. Even a few cat hairs on Beth's clothing could set him off. She tried brushing the cats' hair from herself as best she could, but Kenneth kept hacking a dry cough—like his wife, not saying anything, but always making a point.

In spring, Beth announced she was moving into the cottage. Kenneth said he knew he had a reason for never tearing the thing down, and Clare said she thought moonshiners used to meet there as an exchange point to drink and play cards. “It’s not a cottage,” she said. “More like a speakeasy.” From that day forward, Beth traipses through mud to come to the house for dinner each evening. As musty as that place was in the beginning, she loved her new freedom. Beth painted the walls the saturated color of robin's eggs and didn't particularly mind that the bathroom was missing a door or evidence of ever having one. She became friends with the cats and eventually named them—Mozart and Bad Milo—according to their personalities.

Even the daybed felt more enjoyable and less noisy in the speakeasy. There was some tackiness to be seen by her good sheets on the uneven surface of the mattress, but Beth slept better there. She no longer had to listen to Clare or Kenneth whisper at night, trying to keep her from hearing them. It was difficult to tell if there was any fondness in their whispering, and it became tiresome to stay awake and attempt to pick up a word or a tone of voice. Still, Beth missed Pete and found herself thinking of him often at night, a soft and warm sleeper despite his cold hands, who rarely moved and never covered with more than a thin sheet unless feverish or stressed.

Beth spent a lot of time alone in the speakeasy, except for the occasional visit from Stephen, who became more accustomed to her, or so it seemed. He liked to open cans of food for the cats, but he was still too afraid to pet them because of his father's allergies. Of all the strange things in that speakeasy—the bathtub sunken into the floor, the roof sweating nicotine from former smokers—the strangest thing was the electric can opener fastened into the kitchen wall. The previous inhabitants made everything as nasty and inconvenient as possible, but they saw to it that opening a can was easy enough to do. The object, old and gimmicky, amused Stephen, and he gave Beth a little company now and then, even though the child was as hard to get to know as anyone Beth had ever met. The students and wives of Pete's colleagues were nothing in comparison to her grandson.

On a Saturday in April, when the land had thawed for the season, Kenneth dug out a few square yards of ground, built a couple of raised beds and tossed in some topsoil. He hooked up a PVC pipe sprinkler system that attached to a long hose outside the house. Then, he poured a trail of gravel rock from the speakeasy to the back door of the kitchen. Beth wouldn't have to manage through mud anymore when she walked up for dinner. Kenneth never told Beth that he built the garden for her, but she knew she would be the only one tending it. “Try to keep those cats from shitting in there,” Kenneth said. That was his way of letting Beth know the garden was finished.

From the first day, the garden was good and workable. Beth planted squash and zucchini in one bed, cucumbers and tomatoes in another, herbs and peppers in the last. She planted sweet potatoes around the speakeasy, because she knew the vines would grow like mad. No one seemed too excited about it. Clare said she did not remember the garden Beth kept during her childhood. She was content buying produce from the grocery store or downtown farmer's market, but Beth thought maybe she could make Stephen enjoy the warmth of a vegetable from the vine. Maybe she could persuade him to pet Mozart or Bad Milo. Maybe she could cause him to accidentally say more than one sentence at a time.

Stephen squeaked across the yard one summer morning and stood in the water spilling from the PVC pipe. He wore yellow rain boots with khaki shorts and a blue hooded jacket. Beth did not know whether his mother sent him over or if he came on his own. He stood in the water, arms by his side and head down, allowing the low stream to soak the front of his chest. With his eyes closed, he touched one hushed current with an outstretched hand and then bent slightly forward. Water parted his hair below the crown, dripped down his neck, and plastered dark hair to his forehead. When the silent child began to hum something she had never quite heard before, Beth closed her eyes, too. In that moment, Stephen was the most beautiful and alive person she had felt in a long, long time. She wanted to try and give him the gift shop beagle again.

The peppers and tomatoes grew quickly in the early summer season. Beth had to reinforce the stakes supporting the tomatoes with woven copper wire. She was concentrating on braiding with Bad Milo smacking his paws at the soles of her shoes when she felt Stephen standing behind her.

“Well, won't you be happy when these are ripe and you can slice them up for dinner?” Beth touched a large, green tomato weighing down a branch barely supporting its size.

“I'm not allowed to slice,” Stephen said.

“I can show you how.”

Beth picked two medium-sized red peppers from another bed and led Stephen inside the speakeasy. He took his shoes off by the door, not that tracking in dirt or rocks could have made the dingy linoleum tile any worse than it already was. Beth washed, gutted the seeds, and dried the peppers with a paper towel. She placed them on a cutting board and pulled a utility knife from the drawer. “Let's see,” she said. Carefully, Beth sliced one half of a pepper while Stephen watched. She moved the blade slowly and demonstrated how her other hand was kept away from the sharp edge.

Beth put the knife in his hand, but he didn't grip it naturally. His hand was limp, as though he thought his mother was nearby watching him. Beth stood behind Stephen and wrapped her hand around his positioning her finger and thumb so he could move more comfortably. She guided his hand over the cutting board, back and forth, wanting him to feel the motion and take to it on his own. Stephen looked up at Beth for what might have been the first time. She held the pepper in place with its skin facing down on the board. Stephen's grip felt loose beneath hers.

“Come on,” Beth said. She tightened her hand around his. “It's easy.”

“It's not,” he said.

“It's okay,” she said.

Neither know whose hand was actually holding the knife when it touched the pepper to make a second slice, but when Stephen jerked away, he twisted the knife into Beth's hand. Blood covered and stained the cutting board. The knife dropped, but before Beth could say a word, Stephen was gone. The screen door slammed against the frame. In the bathroom, Beth turned on the cold water in the crooked sink, ran her hand under the spigot, and watched diluted blood swirl around the drain. She could tell that her hand needed stitches. The pain was clean and sharp and too close to the bone. It was numb and throbbing at the same time. Beth thought she might need to walk up to the house and ask Clare or Kenneth to drive her to the hospital in Chapel Hill.

But first, Beth cleaned the utility knife and put it away. She rinsed the red pepper and the cutting board. Light poured into the speakeasy onto her secondhand furniture and roll-top desk that she had not used once since leaving Saint Agnes. The beagle from the airport gift shop stood on top of her miniature refrigerator next to votive candles and bottle of brandy. Her hand continued to throb and bleed through the paper towels wrapped around it. She was almost out of paper towels. Beth knew she should tend to the cut on her hand, and she would, and she would see Stephen and quiet all the silly fears his parents put in him, but the room felt warm and she tired, so before she did anything else, Beth lay down on the daybed and just rested and became pleasant in her drowsiness and age and weight.

When Clare burst through the screen door—she almost never came to the speakeasy —Beth thought she was there to pick up Stephen's shoes.

“Stephen is hysterical,” Clare said. “He says he stabbed you.”

Beth sat up, and Clare looked so angry that for a moment, Beth thought she had been the one to hurt Stephen.

“For Christ sake, Mom. Look at your hand.”

When Beth did what her daughter asked, she saw the bedding and linens ruined beneath her. Clare removed the damp paper towels. Blood glued bits of paper to the cut where Beth's skin felt the most tender.

“Honestly,” Clare said, “he's crying his head off, and Kenneth is not happy.”

“Well, I wouldn't want Kenneth bothered,” Beth said.

“I'm going to get the car and bring it down. Where is your insurance card?”

“The wallet.”

“Great.” Clare inspected the speakeasy, like there was something entirely foreign about the place and her mother, and found Beth's wallet on the kitchen table next to an empty tea cup, a folded copy of USA Today, and rosary. Before leaving, she said: “Mom, that secretary really needs to go.”

Like everything else in the speakeasy, the screen door was askew, and with the door open, Beth watched Clare disappear. She wished she had her husband to care for her instead. If Pete were here, Beth could count on him to wrap her wound and make a nice bowl of soup out of the red peppers she left on the counter with onion and garlic and parsley and okra. Why had she chosen not to plant okra in her garden?

At twenty years old, Clare moved away for college, and when she returned home for breaks at Saint Agnes, she would roll her eyes when Beth asked Pete to do something for her, like fix breakfast or clean her shoes. As an adult, Clare did all her cooking and cleaning, and she seemed to forget how she used to tie Pete's apron strings around her body so that the two of them were attached. Pete allowed his daughter to waddle behind him in the kitchen and pretended not to notice her or her laughter. Pete would dramatically narrate his every movement like an actor on a stage reciting Shakespeare or Marlowe: “And now, He is going to taketh these hot-hot potatoes to the sink and draineth them there. He hopes only that the townspeople, the great provokers, are in proper accord with decision such wrought. Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”

Beth smiled and heard the car idling outside the speakeasy, but she did not move. It occurred to her that she had not turned on the PVC pipe to water the garden that day, and if the garden was not watered, all her work would be wasted. Beth followed Clare outside and sat in the passenger seat holding her hand above her heart. She looked at the garden and saw Mozart and Bad Milo—fattened up since she had begun feeding them—digging in the soil and nightshade of the pepper plants. It appeared that they were now hers.

Sarah Key is Craft Talk Editor at The Tishman Review. Her work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Tricycle, Kudzu, NAILED Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the director of a secular non-profit organization, Nashville Women in Atheism, and teaches English as a Second Language to immigrants and refugees.

Saamiya

Desmond White

Their hands are spiders on my scarf when I'm not looking. They pull the cornice in the back until my forehead is uncovered and I notice and hiss. They untie the knot by my right breast or pinch the cloth, leaving wrinkles. Worse. They talk, talk, talk and though I try to drown them out by putting my fists against my ears in a pose made to look like I'm focused on reading, I hear snippets of bitch and terrorist below the rumbling of my blood. Worse. The teacher ignores the intrusions like an actor in a film who can't hear the DVD commentary, but each insult unrefuted is another legitimized, each remark unobstructed leaves the door open.

I try to ignore the parallels between their decision to harass me and the book we are reading in which good children with dirty faces and long hair named Ralph and Piggy and Sam and Eric confront wild children who've turned bad because there aren't any adults to stop them. Under the green light of the island they’re trapped on, the Forces of Good stand on a ledge between red pinnacles and the ocean forty feet below, and ask politely for justice and peace and the return of Piggy’s glasses so they can relight a signal fire and wait for rescue. But the wild ones have become a tribe of hollering monkey-demons, their faces painted black-and-green with mud.

For a moment, I can ignore my classmates as Piggy makes one last stand for Civilization, facing bristling spears and the cackles of bullies, before a deliberate boulder tumbles down and strikes Piggy from chin to knee, and he tumbles, too, to the rocks below.

Piggies always die, whispers the boy behind me. I shut Lord of the Flies before my tears wet the thin pages and expose me, but nothing stops the sob that crawls from my throat like a snort. Something, they all laugh and imitate, that sounds like a boar.

After school they throw rocks (I wonder where they got that idea), shouting Piggy! Piggy! Piggy! and all I can do is scream fuckers! before biking home to examine crescent-moon bruises. Mom wants me to share what happened. She knocks at my door impatiently. But I've already locked it and slipped into the bedwaters of my mattress, because how can you share pain? And if you can, why would you? I imagine gripping her arm and allocating a mote of agony. Imagine Mom shrinking to her knees, shrieking how can you live like this?

That night, I take off my scarf and glasses and stand naked in the mirror. Piggies always die, don’t they? I think, surveying a face brown and red-eyed and pocked with moles and acne scars like bottle flies. They’re strong in all the wrong ways and weak to rocks. I open the medicine cabinet and take an orange bottle. A vestige from when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. I had thought it would be useful. I put the bottle on my bed, and think it kind of looks like a frozen amber tear filled with the white pebbles you put in aquariums.

I think about endings. When does Piggy end? When the boulder slams into his chest? When he hits the rocks below, his brains seeping out like yolk from an egg? When the sea pulls his body swirling under? William Golding might have known.

But in Islam, this is not a person's true ending. After his blood mixes pink with the waves, Piggy’s soul drips out of his body like a water droplet from the sink to be caught in the palm of a sunfaced angel. This angel carefully takes his spirit to the many-doors of Jannah. Without his body, Piggy does not feel asthmatic, despite the wispy air of Jannah’s upper mountains, worn thin from prayers and the altitude. And he doesn't need his spectacles (broken and on Jack’s belt) because he can see the geography of heaven’s manors and mosques with spiritual distinction.

His journey ends before Allah, who tells the heavenly scribes to record Piggy's name in the Book. I imagine the scholars pause to scratch their beards. What do they write for this little soul? They want to ask William Golding but he's busy resting in his coffin. So they opt for Abu Pig. 

Even in the Afterlife there is a registrar like the one where students get their school ID. And there is a test, too, an end-of-course exam that occurs when the soul returns to its tomb. Passing the test turns the tomb into a pleasurable waiting room for Judgment where sentient corpses spend their days in a space expanded like the Tardis into rose gardens and castle halls. Failing the test turns the grave into a torture chamber, and it can fill with snakes or constrict into a stinking bathroom or even a decimal point, a punctuation mark, like what happens in the middle of black holes. It can even dissipate, crushing the owner's rib cage into crystallized dust and starving him of air. But Piggy does not have a grave. When the ambassador returns Piggy's soul to his body, his body (I imagine) has floated, nearly headless, into a blue-green crevice where it lies peacefully, limbs floating freely like sea anemone, and silver fish peeking into the gaps.

There, two angels come to Visit. Even without the ocean deep they are blue-faced and wild-haired, only now they’re intimidated by the Expanse around them, preferring the cloister of a tomb. They have come to see if Piggy deserves to rest in Jannah or the evil Chaos reserved for sinners. The test is the most stressful part of the whole thing and I fear that because he’s not a Muslim he will answer the questions wrong. Piggy, who is your Master? ask the Denier and Denied, peering into his rubbery, dead face. Piggy replies: “Oh, I suppose my Auntie.” Piggy, what religion are you? ask Nakir and Munkar, and he answers honestly: “I am a good, proper Anglican. At least, my Auntie says so.” The angels already know where this is going, but they ask the final question anyway: Piggy, who is the person called Muhammad? Piggy scrunches his wet face in confusion: “Sorry? Who is Muhammad?” Yes, who is this person? "I'm not quite sure," he responds. "Sounds Oriental."

The angels look at each other. If they weren't made of light they might have rubbed their eyes in frustration. They like this child, but he's failed the test.

The angels are prepared to adapt the ocean to their use: shark baths, nibbling fish, electric eels, crushing pressures. But it's not Piggy's fault that William Golding didn't make him a Muslim. They decide to forgo the usual nasties. Instead, they put his corpse in a yellow conch with pink-and-white walls and a drowsy whistle. They give him twenty thousand books to pass the time, including the Qur'an in English, and say: Wait. And that is where Piggy is by the time Ralph faces the Boys with Sticks and crawls up the feet of a Sailor.

But why let death solve everything? I think, and my vision returns to the yellow grains of the ceiling I've been staring at from my bed. I feel generous. Elated, even. And I have an idea. I open my bag and put my take-home copy of Lord of the Flies on the bed, covering the bottle of painkillers from sight, and open to the last page. In the space below the last line, where a rescuing military officer looks sheepishly away from Ralph, who has been overwhelmed by thoughts of innocence lost and darkness found and a wise friend called Piggy, I write:

"Meanwhile and not too far away, Piggy pulled himself up onto the square red rock, feeling a mean headache. He looked up the side of the wall and was impressed by how far he fell – the blur of the cliff's peaks making it seem further. He vomited sea water and tiny white crabs like white pebbles, like a mouthful of sleeping pills, vomited until they were all out of his system, and then he found and pulled the pink mess of brains, soaked in sea foam and littered with pieces of shell, back into his head. His scalp was flapping wildly in the wind, so he ripped his shirt into strips and wrapped it from the top of his head to his chin. Scarf complete, he could look up at Castle Rock without losing his mind, although its pinnacles remained out of focus. 'That's some climb,' he muttered unhappily, but then he perked up. 'I expect Ralph needs me,' he said. 'And the painted boys, too, if they'll listen. I had better begin.'"

I stare numbly at the brown splotches where my tears have landed. "'It’ll take more than rocks to break my bones,'" I make Piggy say, letting him articulate my decision to keep my life.

Desmond White is a licensed professional educator in secondary education (that’s ‘high school teacher’ in layman’s terms) who writes short stories when his students aren’t looking. He currently resides in Houston, Texas. For more of his work, look no further than www.desmondwrite.com.

11-6

Matthew Roth

The news anchor dreams there is a fire, a very bad fire. The only thing that can stop it is water. Everyone is waiting until the fire reaches the ocean. Until it does, the only thing to be done is to report on it. He reads a list of names, of people and businesses and towns affected by the fire. All the names are foreign. He does his best to pronounce each one correctly, short of putting on an accent, which doesn’t test well with the target demographics and makes him feel insincere.

He reads names. He tries to give gravity to each, knowing that among his audience are people with relatives there, people on vacation from there, people whom he is telling that their families are dead. He can’t linger long, though. There are more people waiting to hear the name of the next town to be incinerated, if it is theirs. He pauses before the next name. It is his own language, his own town—the place where he lives now. He lives two blocks away from the TV studio. He can make it to bed fast after the 11:00 news, and then he can be there bright and early for the morning news at six. It doesn’t feel like it’s burning. This must be some weird quirk of live TV, the way it’s filmed, like the five-second delay in case anybody curses.

But they are. They’re burning, and then everyone is dead.

***

The news anchor dreams he’s reporting from a convenience store, the site of a near-robbery. The cashier/owner is telling the news anchor how he foiled the erstwhile robbers. He ducked behind the counter as if to open the safe and then pulled out an ancient tribal mask. It was Gibara, the demon of chaos, whom his people believe is responsible for all randomness in the universe. His father, who still lived in their home city, was a priest of Gibara. People brought offerings to him to keep their lives predictable. The father, a shaman who performed rituals up to sixteen hours a day, was permitted to keep one-quarter of those offerings. The rest had to be burnt. All his life, he was only ever paid in food. When told his son was moving to America, that he would earn a much better living, the shaman cursed him: What use have you for money? he said. Money is a middleman, nothing but the blank space between two contracts. So are you. It is all you will ever be. And the son, who grew up with a priest and a shaman as a father, who knew that every prayer, whether blessing or curse, must be followed up with an amen or risk arousing the demon’s ire, and causing something even worse to happen, said amen.

The son told the entire story to the news anchor, staring deep into the camera, looking earnest, as if he believed his entire speech would make it to television. The news anchor’s producer has an idea: the news anchor should wait in line, buy something, as a way of making the story come to life, so he can report from personal experience. He does. As he’s paying for his purchase—he has selected a single banana—the next person in line pulls out a gun. It’s another mugging. The cashier/owner tries the mask again, but simply gets laughed at. He feels like a fool. And the news anchor, a gun digging into his back, cannot help but pray to the demon, please, I believe you, I believe you, and wishes that the cashier/owner would treat this experience with a little more reverence.

***

The news anchor has been a news anchor for a long time. He is good at his job, and it’s a good job, but that’s all it is to him, a job. Once he had ambition. He thought he’d be an actor. His dependable voice could convince an audience of anything. He could play the male lead in a romance, having A-list actresses throw their weepy selves upon the expanse of his slightly-lesser-known chest, or maybe he could be an action hero. People depended on him. He had a face people trusted.

***

But his slicked-back hair went from killer-whale black to pavement gray, and his chiseled cheeks never looked so rocky. His agent in L.A., the agent who had once seemed so keen on his weekend fly-ins for auditions, offered roles that changed from fathers in commercials to grandfathers in commercials.

The news anchor has lately taken liberties with the news. He indulges his penchant for opening lines and colorful adverbs—he has, after all, been reciting these lines longer than the copywriters have been writing them. He adds personal flourishes, things he knows, things he can guess well enough to improvise. He has been paying attention. The same people resurface in the news again and again: publicity hounds, notables, freaks. He has gained an appreciation for these people: those who don’t merely report the news but create it.

This is what led him to his latest trick. He sees a feature photo appear beside his head on the monitors. He gives it a gift: his own story, the most fascinating and riveting tale that could possibly accompany this picture of a six-year-old girl in the stark seriousness of her yearbook picture or a laughing, loose-tongued hero dog. He ignores the teleprompter, mentally blocks out the frantic producers. He knows he doesn’t have long. Until the end of the night’s newscast, or perhaps only until the next commercial break. But until it happens, and until he is dragged off the set, cameras furtively rolling, filmed by a low-grade cameraman who will release the footage of the news anchor’s breakdown over the internet vainly hoping to create a viral sensation, the news anchor will give these visuals the narration they deserve—the brightest dreams he can spin for them, the best reporting he can ever hope to offer.

Matthue Roth's latest novel is Rules of My Best Friend's Body (Hevria), which you can download for free. Slate called his picture book The Gobblings "perfect." By day, he's a creative writer at Google.