Spring Fevers

By Matt Sinclair

An anthology of short stories, Spring Fevers is an exploration of relationships in their varied states: love -- requited and unrequited -- friendships discovered and lost, family in its many guises, and the myriad places in between. Created by Cat Woods and Matt Sinclair, Spring Fevers arose from their work with the Agent Query Connect online writing community, and while membership in the free site was not necessary for inclusion in the anthology, the ten writers whose stories appear are all members. Authors include MarcyKate Connolly, S.Q. Eries, Robb Grindstaff, J. Lea Lopez, Mindy McGinnis, R.S. Mellette, Yvonne Osborne, Matt Sinclair, A.M. Supinger, and Cat Woods. The debut publication of Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, Spring Fevers was edited by the team of Robb Grindstaff, Matt Sinclair, and Cat Woods, with cover design by Calista Taylor, and book design by R.C. Lewis. A new anthology is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2012.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Sinclair
• Release date: Feb 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985202309

Matt Sinclair

Matt Sinclair is the President and Chief Elephant Officer of Elephant's Bookshelf Press, LLC, which he established in 2012.

Book preview

Spring Fevers

Copyright 2012 Matt Sinclair

Published by Matt Sinclair at Smashwords

Cover design by Calista Taylor

Book design by R.C. Lewis

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Table of Contents

Introduction

First Kiss by Mindy McGinnis

The Haricots Verts by J. Lea Lopez

The Idea Exchange by R.S. Mellette

Connected by MarcyKate Connolly

Annabelle by Cat Woods

The Adventures of Sasquatch by J. Lea Lopez

The Pit by A.M. Supinger

Dreams by Robb Grindstaff

Step Zero by Matt Sinclair

The Tree of Life by A.M. Supinger

Anything for Will by Yvonne Osborne

Resolution by S.Q. Eries

Only by Moonlight by A.M. Supinger

Remy and Charlie by Yvonne Osborne

The Elysar Sea by Matt Sinclair

The Evolution of Love by Robb Grindstaff

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Introduction

There’s an old Irish saying I love: bionn gach tasu lag. It means every beginning is weak. Things will improve, or they’ll languish and die. In my strange way, I find the saying filled with hope.

Relationships come and go. Some bloom into the most important friendships and loves that we ever know. Others pass like faces on the bus.

When Cat Woods and I began discussing ideas for this anthology, we thought it would be nice to publish stories about relationships of all sorts: love, requited and unrequited; friendships discovered and lost; family in its many guises. Writers, myself included, tend to be quite familiar with bittersweet emotions, and the stories we received were rarely warm or fuzzy. And we were reminded that love is not necessarily about romance.

Spring Fevers is a collection of the most memorable moments and characters we met. I thank all those writers who shared their tales. I hope you find these stories compelling and provocative, and I encourage you to look at the biographies of each writer to learn more about what compels them to write. While some of them have been published numerous times before, others are seeing their work published for the first time.

Spring is the time of new beginnings, new life, new love. And fevers can result in pain, unexpected visions, and an appreciation for health and normalcy. We open with a story that excited me from the beginning. In Mindy McGinnis’s First Kiss, we find a young woman whose love life promises to be fraught with hope and pain. The closing story, Robb Grindstaff’s Evolution of Love, takes science and faith on a speed date. And when they see the light … well, I’ll let you discover for yourself.

— Matt Sinclair

First Kiss by Mindy McGinnis

Out where I live, you hear a siren and it's coming for someone you know.

The day Brandon Telford died, I heard the long, wailing rise and fall across the evening mist while I helped Mom pull laundry from the line, the dry cornstalks in the fields around us doing nothing to soften the shrilling scream. My mother's grip slipped on a clothespin as it snapped shut, sending it spinning off into the overgrown green of our lawn, never to be recovered.

Sirens still do that to her.

She won't walk over the well cover, either.

Where's it headed? I asked. We both strained our eyes but could see nothing, only hear the peal that echoed off everything but seemed to come from the east.

Is it Fern? She might've slipped again. I offered something innocuous.

No. She shook her head. Too far.

Might be the new place the Jeffersons built. She's due any day now with the baby, you know.

Mom whisked the last t-shirt from the line, anxious to get indoors and away from the sound of danger. That siren didn't sound like it meant anything good.

I don't think it sounds different whether they're coming for a baby or a body, I countered. She shot me a look that told me I would've done better to keep it to myself.

The night the sirens had come for me, I'd already been in the old well shaft a good twelve hours, the kneecap of my left leg pressed against my cheek, the other leg dangling beneath me. Both my arms were pinned to my sides. I must've been kicking as I fell to end up stuck like that, a wine cork keeping the buried gases of the earth safely at bay.

Even at that depth, the sirens had found my ears, slipping past the dirt and the roots and the milling worms to let me know someone was coming for me. Someone more efficient than my poor mother had been, anyway. Her tears had gained momentum as they fell, so by the time they reached my upturned face, they'd struck like warm hail. I could do nothing more than flinch when they hit, but asking her to go away seemed a bit harsh.

More than a decade later, I'm still mastering the art of talking to Mom without hurting her feelings.

I think it's the Telford place, she said as we made our way to the house, full laundry baskets balanced on our hips. Their boy is about your age, right?

Two years older.

Mom's eyebrows pinched together as she held the screen door open for me. Wasn't he seeing your friend Jess?

Not anymore, I corrected. That went south.

She looked to the east once more, where the pulsating red and white lights bounced off the twisted black tops of the trees in the Telford front yard.

Hope it's nothing serious, Mom said. For Jess' sake.

They broke up, I repeated, dropping my basket onto the hardwood floor.

We folded the laundry in silence, neat squares of washcloths, long rectangles for dishrags, and piles of our own clothes that we never bothered folding before hanging them in our closets. Another squad came, this one blowing past our house and sending Mother out to the front yard, hand to her mouth.

She's never learned how to control panic, something I've had on auto-pilot from the womb, it seems. Mom had told me the doctors were shocked I didn't cry when I slipped from her warmth into the cold, sterile light of the delivery room. I suppose that's a gene that must've come to me through Dad, though it failed him at least once in his life. I guess it might be specific to life-threatening situations, which getting your girlfriend pregnant doesn't qualify as. I don’t have the luxury of asking him how our shared stoicism works; I’ve never met the man.

With only one parent in my life, I should've clutched onto Mom, but falling down the well had starkly illuminated the differences between us. Once she fulfilled the initial obligation of finding me, she didn't have much else to offer. Her voice, thick with tears, carried down to me, and that in itself had been an escape from the closeness of everything but the existence of very little. Her lack of control caused an odd calm to settle over me. I couldn't fall farther; I couldn't climb. I had time to think, and even something to eat, if it had been possible to bring the cluster of grapes still clutched in my hand up to my mouth.

When the fire truck got there, somebody had the big idea to drop the hose down to me, but since my arms were pinned, there wasn't much I could do other than bite it. I tried to yell up to them that my arms were stuck, but my voice ricocheted, coming back down to inform me that my arms were stuck. Some genius dropped me a walkie-talkie, but all that did was bounce off my face and rest on my shoulder. It proceeded to ask me, with a fair amount of static and the occasional break-in of the local AM channel, if I was all right, which was so ridiculous I probably wouldn't have answered even if I could.

Finally, someone intelligent had tied two tin cans together and dropped one down to me. I could talk, I could hear, I didn't have to press a button. I would've been profoundly grateful, except whoever did it was so excited about their bright idea they didn't rinse out the can. There's a nice big piece of pork from a can of Pork 'n' Beans stuck on my nose in the newspaper picture to prove it. That and a black eye from the damn walkie-talkie.

I looked scared in the picture, which was just as well. People expected a five-year old who'd been rescued from a well shaft to look that way. Turned out I didn’t have to fake it after something brushed up against me. From below. Most people assumed that the claustrophobia was the worst part, so I let them think it. I didn't tell them the worst part was discovering the space beneath me.

Mom came back inside, brushing a few stray tears from her face. It looks bad, honey. Three squads now.

Okay, I said, tossing the last of my t-shirts onto the misshapen pile of clothes.

I understand if you don't want to talk about it, if it makes you think about—

Yeah, I don't want to talk about it, I said. I took my laundry and headed up the stairs to my room.

They hadn't let me not talk about it for awhile—cops, doctors, shrinks, my mother. As if stringing words together into sentences, or using only the black crayons out of the packs of sixty-four, would actually help anyone.

I couldn't draw what I hadn't seen, and there wasn't a color for nothing.

That's what had been underneath me. My five-year-old brain had finally processed the fact that my loose leg was swinging to pass the time until my rescuers got to me. It swung out into nothing, jauntily ticking away the seconds, blissfully unaware that its very freedom meant something was horribly wrong down there in the dark.

The limitlessness of the nothing beneath had sent a shock wave through my little brain, causing me to cry out into my lifeline, the Pork 'n' Beans can shuddering with the force of my shout. The man on the other end had reassured me that everything would be all right, they were drilling a shaft parallel to me and would be there within minutes, if I could just hold on—or if I wanted to talk. I didn't have a lot to say other than four-letter words I wasn't supposed to know, and There's a piece of hot dog on my face and nothing underneath me, so I kept my mouth shut, the fear firmly clamped inside. Seconds before the invasive light of a headlamp broke through the earth beside me, I realized that Nothing was preferable to Something.

I don't know if it'd been there all along, watching my swinging foot with curiosity, or if it was only passing along its subterranean world, oblivious to the fact that I'd landed in it like a falling star. But it felt like an acknowledgement when it tugged on my foot, a recognition of my existence, or an attempt to be recognized itself.

The first thing I said when they pulled me up was, It took my grapes.

Which was quite true. My little fist had curled protectively around the clump, some primordial sense wanting