All Faculty Excerpts

Ghost Fish

This is an excerpt from Stuart Pennebaker's novel, Ghost Fish.

***

It was a Tuesday night, but the air vibrated like it was a Friday. I wondered if all of summer would be like this. Full of potential.

I stopped at the bodega on the corner for a veggie sandwich. It tasted like French fry grease and I felt like something rare and precious, eating a bodega sandwich while I walked down a city street. When I was halfway to Jen’s apartment, I realized I had nothing to drink, and I wasn’t sure if her invitation was for me to drink her drinks at her apartment or if I was supposed to bring my own. I turned back and bought three single cans of Tecate at the bodega, then opened one on the sidewalk and had that as I retraced my steps.

A few weeks before, I’d turned twenty-three and realized I could hold every good memory I had in one hand. I lived alone in my dead grandmother’s empty house. My mom was dead; my sister too. I didn’t need originality; I just needed to be alive.

So I messaged a boy named Tyson on Craigslist who had space to rent in a four-bedroom in the East Village, gave my two weeks' notice, emptied my grandmother’s house of all the dusty, useless things she’d left behind, and took bright bouquets of grocery-store flowers to the graveyard where everyone I’d ever loved now lived. And then I packed my car and drove away from the town that clung to me with every single tentacle of its octopus body.

Jen and I had grown up together in Awnor and still loosely referred to each other as friends. We were from the same patch of nowhere land, a negative space she'd shed four years earlier and that I'd only just escaped. She was someone who’d known me well enough to attend my mother’s funeral when we were fifth-graders, and my sister’s when we were old enough to truly understand what death meant. But she’d vanished from my life when she’d gone away to college.

Still, she was the only living person I knew in the city, so when I’d packed my car and pointed north a few days prior, she was the only one I told. We hadn’t spoken for some years, but she responded to my message with lots of exclamation points and invited me to “pre-drink drinks” at her apartment. I hadn’t met my roommates yet or put sheets on my bed, and most of my clothes were still in trash bags on the floor of my tiny room, but I was eager for my new life to begin.

When I got to Jen's building, I stared at the silver box on the wall. There was a button next to her unit, 7C, but I wasn't sure if the correct etiquette was to buzz her or text her. I pressed the button, but nothing happened. Then I heard a loud metallic sound and Jen's voice, distorted and robotic, yelled through the speaker: “Come up!”

***

Reprinted with permission from Little Brown & Co. You can buy the book here.