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20 Contrary Years: A Selection


 

Contrary has published 40 stories by Edward Mc Whinney, the percipient and enigmatic writer from Cork. You’ll find them all here, starting with the first wistful tale — “Advice: Get the Farewell Right” — that introduced us to the wordsmith who would would charm our hearts anew with each submission.


 

Outis Odysseus


 

Three True Stories

My child does not sleep, so I go walking with the bones of the dead. The stroller wheels click along the path, trees frame panes of light across the rows. The plots, green and even, are misnamed, trading stories for simple verse, for peace.


 

blackbirds baked in a pie


 

Swan Garden

When they take off into the sky, wings skimming the surface of water and a thin spread of algae, it’s like the air vibrates, sound waves colliding gas molecules so that, even from behind a window, I hear a swooping gust followed by silence.


 

Stolen Missed Connections


 

Dark Matter

If the boy continues to ruminate, he’ll have dark thoughts. No one to stop him. Not even the girl he is always thinking about, the one who plays with toads, talks to them, and squints hard when he talks to her, when they meet near the village square.


 

Ad Astra Per Aspera


Rooms

The bathroom must have been cold in winter—our house was heated by a woodstove, downstairs—but I remember it only in summer, the window open, a blue-green damp coming down off the Allegheny foothills.


 

Meditation on the Butterfly Effect


 

After Hours

The bathroom must have been cold in winter—our house was heated by a woodstove, downstairs—but I remember it only in summer, the window open, a blue-green damp coming down off the Allegheny foothills.


 

A Cutter’s Sestina (Prom ’95)


 

The Idea of Birds

I read poems about trains, about the people and places that pass by in an instant, Indians and women in calico dresses, about something lost on a journey, or found. Then he reads “Mock Orange” and “Eros” by Louise Glück. He doesn’t know what they are about but knows he feels sorry for her.


 

Stillbirth


 

The Unbearable Here

Mother, here’s what I need you to know: this is going to hurt. This is going to slip under your nail, black and blue it’s pink. You’ll breathe this in while you sleep, a knot, edgy and fibrous, that leaves hair-thin strips of me in your soup or your peanut butter. The part of the throat only reachable by a gag. You think I never was.


 

How Gypsy Invented the Tease


 

Declining Rooms

Lori ran out of her house and into the rain. She didn’t bother to lock the door or check the mailbox or feed the cats. She’d left her lipstick and earrings on the bathroom sink. Her umbrella was inside the hall closet, lost underneath a jumble of Cody’s Earth shoes.


 

Allegory


 

Subjects for the Smoking Room

A red-haired woman in a ballgown strolls out of an ER. There is a sky, just enough madness on it. There are flattened, halved pieces of rock for sidewalk.


 

Travelogue


 

Love Like All the Stars in the Sky


 

The Lesson


 

Mausoleum

A body wants to lie down; it wants to buy a plot. Who will meet you at the entrance to this mausoleum? She there, with her head in her hands, woman of sorrow guarding the steps, bent to a phosphorous moss so slimy and insidious it liquefies stone.


 

On Gratitude


 

The Last Miracle of Kitezh

A body wants to lie down; it wants to buy a plot. Who will meet you at the entrance to this mausoleum? She there, with her head in her hands, woman of sorrow guarding the steps, bent to a phosphorous moss so slimy and insidious it liquefies stone.

 


 

Say Uncle

Last day at Assumption. Bricking the belfry. Two hundred feet in the sky. It’s hard thinking up here. So I don’t. I do my job. One brick at a time. Some small talk with the young tenders. One of them got lucky last night. They chisel him for details, but he stays mum.


 

It Takes All Kinds


 

Pablo Escobar’s Hippos

 The blue-eyed plecostomus will not eat shit, and they will not eat driftwood covered in shit. It is unfortunate that submerged wood sustains them because Pablo Escobar’s hippos unload turd after constant turd, coating the driftwood of the Magdalena River, native habitat of the blue-eyed plecostomus who will not eat their shit. They’d rather die.


 

Plum Island

I’ve seen him here before, this hour of the day, the sun sinking, ebb tide, and on this same spot on Plum Island, where he stands apart from the other fishermen, who look like fishermen. He doesn’t.


 


 

Dear John James Audubon

I hung suet early this year, not because I was particularly organized but because I was eager for the companionship of birds.


 

Planting


 

Vaucluse

Virid is the spring that snakes through our garden dappled with sun-shade (snake-skin)  surrounded by choked-up laurels and strange purple flowers that waver in the water like reflected nightmares


 

When We Were Girls

I’m lying on the edge of the lake. My head is cupped by ice-crusted mud. My hands and bare feet tingle. A cop is there, hovering over me. She’s a black woman in her thirties, her eyes wet and shining from the cold wind.


 

Gilt


 

We Were Girls Once, Dancing

I cup my hand to the DJ’s ear. We’ve stumbled into that sloppy part of the night. The cake cut. The bouquet tossed. The grandparents and children on their way to bed, and the men around the bar loosen their ties and order another round.


 


 

Ascenscion

When he met me, he stood so close to the lunch table that I had to look straight up him, as one might look up the contours of an overhanging cliff, which meant that he had to look straight down at me, as one might look over the very edge of the cliff.


 

Eating the New Species


 

Abandoned Art

I once fell in love with a girl who abandoned all of her art, never signed any of her paintings. She’d fold up little pieces of paper into lotus flowers & jumping frogs, and staple them to bulletin boards around town or leave them sitting on tables at the laundromat. At bars she’d pick at her beer bottle until the label peeled off in one piece, and leave it, a rose, inside the bouquet on the counter.


 

Rename the Birds


 

I’m freshly eighteen years old. The piercer clamps my tongue with forceps and says oh, that thing’s just begging to be pierced. This discomfort is layered and hard to describe. His rubber gloves are smooth as what skin, I think, should be like.


 

The Factory


 

The Empty Armchair

Being sick has taken away the busy surface of my life. Gone are the errands and the superficial, the insubstantial, the time-wasting. Being still is forcing me to reflect on what remains. Boil a life down to its essence. Freeze it, and see what rises. Tucked into bed, my body is at rest, but my eyes search the room, settling on the blue armchair.