First Marriage: A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events

By Kevin Moffett

In this story from Kevin Moffett's dazzling new collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, a honeymooning couple in Arizona faces the vast future ahead of them—and the immediate problem of a dead animal stinking up their rental car. This meditation on marriage, commitment, and all that we give to and keep from those we love comes with equal parts heartbreak and bone-dry humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062233219

Kevin Moffett

Kevin Moffett's stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, as well as in three editions of The Best American Short Stories. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2010 National Magazine Award for the title story. He lives in Claremont, California.

Book preview

First Marriage

A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events

Kevin Moffett

Contents

Cover

Title Page

First Marriage

For More Stories from Kevin Moffett

Copyright

About the Publisher

First Marriage

They noticed the odor outside Tucson the day after they got married. They were driving on a bleak stretch of highway and Tad thought they might be near a rendering plant or a dead coyote, but twenty miles later the odor hadn’t dissipated. It was putrid and dense and seemed to be getting denser. Amy drove with her hand over her nose while Tad rolled down the windows and breathed.

Don’t worry, he said. We’re not far.

They were headed to Bisbee in a car, a Volvo, that belonged to a man named Gar Floyd, who expected them in Jacksonville, Florida, in eight days. This was their destination or, more accurately, their halfway point. The car was part of a program called Drive Way. In Florida they’d be given somebody else’s car, which they would drive back to California.

It’s thickening on my tongue, Amy said. It’s like we’re being punished.

The odor swelled. It ate at the air. It was as if some giant, blood-rancid bird had dragged itself into the backseat and spread its wings and roosted there.

In Bisbee the station attendant sat in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes. A few seconds later, he stepped out of the car, coughed, wiped his hands on a blue towel, coughed again, and said, It’s animal.

Tad and Amy looked at each other. Amy handed over the keys and she and Tad walked their luggage to their motel: a cluster of Airstream trailers decorated with atomic-print throw pillows and chintz curtains. Theirs was the Royal Manor. Tad rifled through the cabinets while Amy showered.

Reviews for First Marriage

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A collection of nine short stories -- “pedigreed” stories you might say, since eight of them were previously published in literary journals like McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Harvard Review, and two of those were selected for volumes of The Best American Short Stories series.They're quietly funny, mostly accessible but sometimes confounding, and often melancholy but in a comforting way that says we get through difficult times. I enjoyed the originality in premise or voice in most of the stories, especially the title story about a young writer, his writing mentor, and his father who in retirement "began writing trueish stories about fathers and sons"; and another that opens when an architecture student, on board a plane awaiting takeoff to Italy, receives a text that the terminally ill father he just visited has died ... the tension builds beautifully as he hesitates, deciding whether to go back or go on.I gave up on one (curiously, the only unpublished) story and skimmed another. But I’ll look for more by Kevin Moffett.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)