Remedies for Hunger

By Anara Guard

This collection of short stories focuses on moments in life when something turns, a choice is made, a promise kept or broken. With vivid and precise details, these quiet tales introduce you to characters whose inner lives are both troubled and eloquent. You smell the permeating odors in a rundown Chicago apartment building, touch the texture of a bear's thick fur, feel your feet scraping against the coils of a hairy rope ladder in the bathtub. These compressed observant tales provide a remedy to readers hungry for stories that will resonate long after the last page is turned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Wind Publishing
• Release date: Aug 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781929777068

Anara Guard

Anara Guard grew up in Chicago. Her lifelong love of reading has led her to jobs as diverse as minding a Chicago news stand at the age of nine, working as a librarian in a small New England town, fact-checking manuscripts for Houghton Mifflin, and writing book reviews. An award-winning poet, she has had short stories published in the anthology, Twenty Twenty: 43 Stories from a Year Like No Other; in her collection, Remedies for Hunger; and in various literary magazines. She attended Bread Loaf Writers Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is currently working on her second novel.

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Praise for

Remedies for Hunger

Chicago Book Review

4 Stars

These short stories are snapshots of urban life, intertwined with scenes from the country or the odd suburb... stories about children, con men, hippies, sweet fathers, and negligent mothers. Anara Guard picks out the secret jewels of the hardscrabble life where the domestic scene reveals the larger landscape Her subject is the mystery of childhood, the certainty of death and the shining light somewhere in between with all its startling beauty.

Lisa Page, acting director of creative writing, George Washington University

Anara Guard has an eye for the offbeat detail, the peculiar utterance, lending her stories a realism that is not only magical but also quirky and funny. She conjures a kind of enchanted landscape whose perils are navigated by characters who must contend with the oddness of their reality. These darkly whimsical stories of misfits – a girl who doesn’t know left from right, a mother who bleaches her children’s eyebrows, a realtor showing a house to a bear – unfold in delightfully unexpected ways.

Abby Bardi, author of The Book of Fred

Praise for

The Sound of One Body

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These fine stories offer brief, knowing glimpses into lives in transition. Anara Guard is a writer to be read again and again.   

Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories

These strong, haunting stories are like small wounds, nothing fatal, but nevertheless permanent; not scars but bruises won in battle, each one a glancing blow that leaves a distinct mark, and a memory of the pain we can inflict or endure when we’re not even looking.

Robert Goolrick, author of A Reliable Wife

Remedies for Hunger

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Stories

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Anara Guard

New Wind Publishing

Sacramento

New Wind Publishing

Sacramento, CA 95819

www.newwindpublishing.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2014 by Anara Guard

Ready and Seven Wonders of the World first appeared in slightly different form in The Sound of One Body, Back Pages Books, 2010.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review.

Published in the United States by

New Wind Publishing

Sacramento, California

www.newwindpublishing.com

Library of Congress CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Guard, Anara

Remedies for Hunger: stories / Anara Guard

1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-929777-06-8

Fiction – general. 2. Short stories, American.

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Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Karen Phillips

Logo design by Jim Hunt

Layout by Christopher Derrick

For Dave

Who waited across thousands of miles,

who is a beacon in the dark,

who reduces boulders to smooth pebbles

and turns fences into gates,

who serenades the morning

with music and laughter,

my silver chevalier.

Table of Contents

Ambidextrous

Georgia

Neighbors

White Lies

Realty

The Deep End

Ready

My Fourth Grade Diary

Zhee Zhou

Seven Wonders of the World

What Remains

Homecoming

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ambidextrous

How can you be an adult and still not know your left from your right? Gene shares this sentiment with me as often as my peculiar failing irritates him, which is to say almost every day.  He says, It’s like not knowing how to tie your shoes, for Chrissake! (Which, for the record, I do know how to do. It just happens that I never buy any shoes with laces.)

It’s not that I haven’t tried to learn. In kindergarten, the concept was presented simply for one purpose. When we stood to face the flag, our left hands were supposed to be plastered to our chests. Somehow this would make the pledge binding, or show that we really meant it. Something like that, anyway. The teacher lined us up in long rows facing the flag, arranged by the first letter of our last names. I stood between Lisa Mays and Charlie Morton and I knew that the hand next to Charlie was the one to place over my heart. But when Charlie stayed home with the mumps, I didn’t know what to do. Reggie Peterson stood beside me and I didn’t have a Reggie hand.

Ever since, I’ve never figured out which hand is which. Of course I know there is such a concept as left and right but as far as I can tell these are haphazardly assigned. There’s no mnemonic, no clue, no roadmap. I have a 50-50 chance of being right just by guessing. So, frequently, I get away with it. But often (actually, just as often) I’m wrong.

In high school, my best friends proposed that I pierce one ear and then I would know that the one with the earring in it was, well, whichever I chose: left or right. By this time, I already knew their idea wouldn’t work; it simply transferred the obligation of memory from my hands to my ears. Which one was it that was pierced—left? The question presupposed that I knew, really understood on some deep level, what it was to have a left ear or leg or anything. I could picture myself fingering the little silver stud each morning and asking, What did I decide about my pierced ear? Was it supposed to be Earring in the left because there’s an E in left? Or the R in right matches the pair of Rs in the word? I told them I wasn’t willing to make holes in my body to make this problem go away.

My friend JoAnn showed me, holding up one hand—which one, I couldn’t tell you—that by tilting her thumb down, parallel to the wrist, her thumb and forefinger made the shape of an L.

Look, she said, L for Left.

"Well, yeah, I know what letter starts the word. But both my hands make an L, don’t they? It just depends on which way you look at it. Palm facing you and there’s an L. Palm facing me and there’s an L."

"Corrie, just try," she said. But I was irritated. JoAnn is a third grade teacher and I felt like one of her students.

So now I have to memorize which way to hold my hand, a certain hand, the one that, if I knew which one it was, I wouldn’t have to learn this dumb parlor trick in the first place?

Dumb parlor trick? she responded. Who ended up in the men’s room at the Sports Lounge because the directions were: men’s on the left, women’s on the right, and she didn’t pay attention to the signs on the doors?

Me, I admitted.

And who almost drove off the end of the pier after she guessed which way to turn?

Well, okay, but—

But, nothing! I’m just trying to help.

I told her she was right. After all, she was only one of many people who over the years have tried to teach me with varying levels of patience, aggravation and occasionally, force. I’ve endured ink marks and stickers on the backs of my hands, different colored shoelaces in each shoe, subliminal training tapes that I listened to while I slept. There was a teacher who smacked her yardstick on my desk mere millimeters away from whichever hand had offended her—as if I was supposed to know whether she was angrier at one than the other. And the contra dancers who smilingly stepped on my feet on purpose, hissing "Left! Left!" at me through gritted teeth.

On our first date, I made the mistake of answering Gene’s challenge to share something interesting about myself. So I told him, laughing a little and gazing at him sideways. He seemed to find it a charming idiosyncrasy coming from a flirtatious 30-something woman, instead of a ludicrous admission by a defective 34-year-old unmarried woman.  I went home with him that night. We walked up the steps of the courthouse together a few months later. But by Christmas, it was clear that the charm had evaporated when he bellowed into the phone, "How could you be lost again?! You’ve been there before. It’s only half a mile away!"

I understand why he got so aggravated; most people have some kind of internal compass that records which way they turned into the parking lot from the road. And when they leave the lot, their compass rotates and tells them to reverse whatever it was they did before. But for me, the way out never looks like it did on the way in. As I sit, idling at the exit, I don’t recognize the trees or the light poles and neither up nor down the road looks familiar.  I know I have a fifty-fifty chance so I mentally flip a coin and then turn the steering wheel in the other direction.

Tonight there’s no way I’m getting off this bar stool and finding a pay phone to call him. I’ll sip my glass of white wine and figure out what to do. I think it has more to do with deciding which one of us is going to move out of the apartment than choosing which way to turn when I leave the restaurant. The word left is going to take on a whole new meaning for him if I’m the first one to pack up.

I’m on my second glass when the good-looking man at the end of the bar offers to buy me another. I tell him, no thanks, I’m not that much of a drinker. But we can talk.

What would you like to talk about? he asks. He has a twinkle in his brown eyes and a soft mouth that doesn’t look cruel.

Tell me what you think about right and left, I say.

Like politics?

Not exactly.  When I tell him my dilemma, he laughs. But it’s a good laughter like he’s genuinely amused and wants to know more. He says, That must make life pretty interesting.

Well, it has led to some exciting times. He moves to the stool next to mine and I tell him my best stories.

Do you ever feel left out? He’s asking like he really wants to know.

To me, it’s kind of like being a city kid out in the country at night and trying to see the constellations. Your friends say, See that star there, the bright one?" and they point straight up, to the vast dark sky. There are dozens and dozens, no, hundreds

Reviews for Remedies for Hunger

[anaraguard · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Seems self-serving to review my own book, so I'll only say that I am my harshest critic and I still like it! Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think!