NEW FICTION

Who knows what thoughts cross the man’s mind as he gazes upon this glittering, green slice of paradise? Who can map that tangled interior, those labyrinth chambers of his mind? What memories flare like sparks, and which corners remain dark, dormant?

Does the sight of so many all-but-naked bodies stir something in him? Or does it pull him backward—to his mother, to her hand tugging him toward the car after swim, to a half-remembered sermon about shame, to the certainty that beauty and loss are always intertwined? Does the crash of breakers remind him of the relentless crush of time? Or does it remind him of the natural ebb and flow of all things? Of the sweet futility of resistance?

Perhaps his thoughts are smaller, pettier: Are the Mets losing (again)? Does the rental car really have to be returned with a full tank of gas? Does the persistent bump on his left testicle warrant a call to Dr. Benson? Or another month of avoidance? Does he turn over, again and again, the whisper-fight with his wife by the pool, the one about nothing and everything?

Does he worry about his waistline? His cholesterol—the bad one—which Dr. Benson warned him to keep an eye on? Does he worry about the hair gathering in the drain and the twinge in his left knee that feels like a harbinger, even though he’s not even fifty? Does he consider the balance on his credit card, the health of his parents in Phoenix, NATO, genocide, the day-by-day destruction of democracy and the earth itself?

Will he remember to tip the valet? The housekeeper? Does he wonder how his investments are doing and whether he should get that new iPhone and will his oldest daughter go in state or out of state, which is what the man and his wife were fighting about, anyway? Should he check his fantasy team for the thousandth time today? And beneath all this static, does he glimpse it? The truth? That everything is fleeting? That he is one of those waves, rolling endlessly toward the shore, collapsing in a rush of foam and silence? Does he recognize that he is just like those surfers standing on their boards in the setting sun, caught up in the sweep of something beyond their control?

Joseph Pfister’s fiction has appeared in Hobart, PANK, Juked, and X-R-A-Y, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.