Today's story from a journal is from an online journal so everybody can read it as well. And rumor has it, there will soon be an announcement about the collection that it resides within, and the home it appears to have found for publication next year.
"The Law of Strings" was published by Joyland, the Midwest strain, just over a year ago. It's by Steven Gillis (yes, my partner at Dzanc Books--there will be some of my favorites spread about through the month).
It is a story broken into fifteen small sections, the first two of which, I include here:
Lange sits and watches Eva while she sleeps. On the floor, in the space between, is a book by Jerzy Kowlaski-Glikman, Towards Quantum Gravity, dislodged from the shelf in the hubbub of Friday, left there as gravity dictates. Lange can reach Glikman with his right toe but chooses not to, no energy exerted to put the text back, he doesn’t see the point, remains with his legs bent, his arms in a dangle.
The ropes tied to Eva’s legs create a slight rise beneath the sheet. The apartment is clammy, the bedroom window closed although it’s summer, Eva likes the heat, prefers not running the fan or any sort of air conditioning.
Sweat gathers beneath the collar of Lange’s shirt. His chair is ersatz leather, closer to plastic, black with cherry wood arms. Why Lange is sitting and watching Eva sleep rather than laying beside her, underwear jettisoned, is a testament to his own restraint, a decision made two days ago, one he is starting now to question.
______
In the lectures Lange gives his class, undergrads taught as part of his PhD requirement, Lange explains how the majority of energy in the universe is dark. “74% of the universal density,” Lange says, “compared to 4% for ordinary matter.” He describes how particles in dark matter repel themselves gravitationally, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. A critical force, dark energy routinely fills empty space. Lange repeats this, makes sure his students understand. “Dark energy fills empty space.”
Similar to the Danielle Evans story looked at earlier today, Gillis starts his story
at that point that it's almost complete. He doesn't give us a ton of backstory on Lange, or Eva, and doesn't need to for this particular episode within their lives.
An aspect that I love about this story, and thinking about it, almost all of Gillis' most recent work, is how well he merges information into the writing. He's able to merge what I'll call 'his ideas' and those of the story together seamlessly. And I don't necessarily mean for 'his ideas' to denote his philosophy, or his politics, etc. What I mean by 'his ideas' is what he as the author has determined is information about his characters that his reader needs to know. In his stories, there is a fairly heavy amount of science, of politics, of material that could very, very easily be expounded upon in long diatribes, weaving away from the story itself. He avoids this in his writing, allowing the information to come from his characters. It's not an easy task (based on reading many stories or novels that lean more toward polemic than tale), but one he pulls off within this story, and others.
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