In Space, Smiling (2)

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Our featured story is "The Peripatetic Coffin," by Ethan Rutherford, which will appear in BASS 2009.

The sound of iron walls adjusting to the underwater pressure around you was like the sound of improbability announcing itself: a broad, deep, awake-you-from-your-stupor kind of salvo. The first time we heard it, we thought we were dead; the second time we heard it, we realized we were.

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In Space, Smiling (2)

[continued from page 1]

Oh, what country did your family come from? they’ll ask.

I tell them my family came from space, and they believe me because my degree is in communications. I tell them I will return to space, that this is my last dream.

My poor, dead parents are in space, smiling, even though I have disappointed them. I cannot handle snakes or blood. I cannot be the things I promised. But I will make them believe in me. I will use this business card as a map to find them, and when I do, we will go out for ice cream, and I will explain how nothing went wrong, not really. I will tell them I was happy to be one thing, and they will believe me.

Adam Peterson lives in Houston and coedits The Cupboard, a quarterly prose chapbook series. His series of short-shorts, My Untimely Death, is out from Subito Press, and his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals.

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