Gev Sweeney: Stories & Stuff

 MY FATHER BEFORE HE DIED wrote things we couldn't imagine because he never told us what he was writing and burned the papers before we could read them. The premature cremation should not have been the cruelty we perceived at the time but an expectation. His father had done the same, as had his father before him - the one who brought into the family She Whose Name Has Masked Me For Life. Aside from that name, you wouldn't know we were related. Perhaps, though, even with that name, you would still not connect the one with the other. It was because of all those things that were written yet unseen by my male forbears that I was born in America. And it was because of things written yet unseen, with their monster-amalgam of monster-suppositions and monster-audience, that launched me into the world like a boat from a foundering ship into a raging sea, to live or die according to elements untroubled by the mechanics of destruction. . . . 

  Sunday School Sass: Alternate-history riffs on religious themes Ferial Day (novella) - A familiar gospel's origins, retold. For the Burnable Cities  (novel) - The early Christian persecutions, set in Jacksonian America. Master Warrick ( novella) - Survivors of Good Friday seek peace in Norman England. Salutaris  (novel) - What an unlikely college professor did and what he was were nothing compared to what he would become. The Prodigal's Psalm (novella) - Lust and transformation years after the Flight into Egypt.

  WHEN EVERYTHING WAS OVER but still stuck in the part of Bereshis where God begins to create the world, it was almost like coming out of a hurricane shelter, seeing ruins all around, and wondering whose home was left. Almost. There was the same uncertainty, the same fear of loss, the same unspoken "What happens now?" But instead of wondering whose home was left, you wondered who was left. You stood there thinking: Is that what Jesus thought when he walked out of the tomb? "Who's left? Who's still here?" Was he afraid to hear what the Apostles had to tell him? Did he dread walking along the streets, seeing who was sitting shiva? And you recited (to yourself) the great litany of things that those no longer here would never do: find their dream house; get married; buy that new dress; lease that new car; repair the plumbing; repaper the parlor; sign the divorce papers; read the book they always wanted to read; write the book they always wanted to read; play g

Now the canal was gone, the Old Overflow was no more, and Mommy’s father and the skunky dog were mummified tales preserved by Mommy and Daddy and uncles, aunts, and cousins who would stop on the slog through their personal deserts and expose the memories to derision, mourning the dead and enjoying the loss as they relived in words growing up in the Great Depression, bereft of childhood, forsaking school for jobs as low in status as they were in pay: ironing linens in a laundry, swilling counters for a butcher, sweeping homemade whiskey from the oil-blotched floor of a body shop. They were raised in a part of the city where American-Irish and American-German and American-Italian and American-Syrian and American Lebanese kids played basketball together and went to school and dated and it didn’t matter that their parents were still learning English, and you were as likely to hear cliffhangers about the famo

  FAIRLISS REMEMBERED the caterpillar. It wasn’t the time of year for caterpillars. The sun rose late on ice-thorned woods, and geese were living on whatever they could scrape beneath the crust that used to be foliage. Yet  there was the caterpillar: spit-pale, plump, descending on a line that was impossible to see and that had neither end nor beginning. It had come out of nowhere, and nowhere was where it was going. So it was with this woman — this Mary Amalia Saxon. She too had come out of nowhere; she too had a destination that Fairliss could neither name nor imagine. Yet there she was, sitting amid the cozy clatter of the kitchen in borrowed underpinnings and dressing gown, her face a plaid of gashes, her hair a tattered ball on the back of her neck. She couldn’t remember precisely what happened, she was saying. There had been no reason to commit those final moments to memory: no need to hold them close, as one preserves the sound of a loved one’s last breath. She and her Scu

  Priest. Professor. Musician. Vampire. Long a prisoner of the Church, John Hance is damned to eternal life drinking the blood of Christ instead of the blood of humans. An enigmatic girl becomes his student at the obscure college where he's taught for nearly seven years. She knows too much about him. Is she insane or ingenuous? Or is she a divine emissary sent to remind him that, sometimes, justice is something else? Whenever a frightened young singer opener her mouth to him for the first time, Hance remembered Mary Guaire. She had made the same noises when Marsden tightened the  bejeweled garrote around her throat, turning the Queen of the Night's aria into a mess of bubbling squeals as the sparkling chain severed the route between breath and life. The lamentable business had occurred long ago, when people played fortepianos and  electricity was an experiment with lightning. But every time Hance had cause to envision Mary Guaire, he could never entirely dispel the impulse to

  L A T E R she would remember t he woman in the muskrat coat: how she smiled on the snowy street shining gold in the late-day sun , a sleepy puppy in her arms. And later she would remember the hot-powder scent of the movie projector, and the raspy whir of machinery spinning images she couldn’t remember seeing for herself but were captured when they got the dog for Christmas. (See? There’s the tree, in the parlor, a Daddy-tall evergreen dripping silvery strips around obese raindrops in pine-needle grottos glowing blue or red or yellow.) But that would be later. In the beginning she didn’t know where she was or when she was or what she was or who she was or that she was or that there was anything like a beginning. Her life was one thing after the other. Not in the meaning of a parade of trials and troubles and travesties. In the meaning of whatever was in front of her, or beside her or in the room with her. Sh