Sudden Prose Reprints: "What Did the Orange Gain" by Anna Reckin

What did the orange gain

                                           when it lost its 'n'? Orotundity and foreignness--an orange is rounder than a naranja. It announces its roundness at the very beginning, out loud in black type: O.

But the 'n' didn't just drop off and fall away, a curl of peel. It slid across into negative space, no-man's land, the indefinite article. There it is, in the middle: empty vessel without so much as an outline around it. 

You can't throw a circle off-balance, but a painting needs a tipping movement. Something to set the eye rolling, ball on a see-saw. Teeter-totter, the clatter of utensils. Cutting board, and the knife's an indicator. Spin it like a needle, and see whose heart it points to. 

Not many murder stories happen in kitchens, despite all the knives, the opportunities. Or maybe they're disembodied--the murders, I mean. Acid, or the ones that slowly boil away until the pan runs dry. Spices whose oils evanesce into the atmosphere...

                                                            the vanishing's the point.

Anna Reckin

Line to Curve (Shearsman, 2018)

 

 

Sudden Prose Reprints: "Fish" by Anna Reckin

Fish

A few hours after dawn, under a bridge in the middle of the city, a wooden rowing-boat, with two fishermen in it. Downstream is the outlet from the printworks, where the swans gather in a rush of warm water; upstream the corrugated cardboard factory, a choking smell of damp paper. Along here, the river's shut in, with straight-sided banks and paved paths, squared off like a canal. I would never expect fish to be here. I would think that they would stay in the greener shady places where the river edges what were once water-meadows (sand and gravel still), now playing-fields.

That night I dream of the fish in the river. The river's course has straightened, blocked off into a long narrow pool: a tank in a Mughal miniature. The city walls are smooth and high, fortified, with watchtowers, and the buildings crowd up against them: towers, domes and minarets. It's after dark, and a single fish hangs in the water, gleaming in the night-time stone.

Anna Reckin
Line to Curve (Shearsman, 2018)