Love Stories: And Other Love Stories

By Justin Brouckaert

In the world of Love Stories, the seams of reality have been subtly loosened. Anteater professors battle impostor syndrome, trains search for soulmates, and men grow taller and taller until their heads scrape the stars. A frustrated young couple resorts to communicating only through the exchange of exotic fruit, until guava is all

• Language: English
• Publisher: Long Day Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950987146

Justin Brouckaert

Justin Brouckaert is the author of the hybrid chapbook SKIN (Corgi Snorkel Press, 2016). His writing has appeared in Passages North, The Rumpus, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Smokelong Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and Bat City Review, among many other publications. He holds an MFA from the University of South Carolina, where he was a James Dickey Fellow in Fiction. He works in book publishing and lives in Metro Detroit.

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LOVE STORIES

& other love stories

By Justin Brouckaert

Copyright © 2021 Justin Brouckaert

Published by Long Day Press

Chicago, Il 60647

LongDayPress.com

@LongDayPress

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced for any reason or by any means without written permission excepting brief passages for reviewing or educational purposes, provided the Author and Publisher are acknowledged in the reproduction. If you steal from us, we probably won’t catch you.

ISBN 9781950987115 (Paperback Edition)

ISBN 9781950987146 (eBook Edition)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021930002

Edited by Joseph Demes

Designed by Joshua Bohnsack

Acknowledgements:

Versions of the following stories have been previously published in Smokelong Quarterly, Cosmonauts Avenue, Passages North, Amazon’s Day One, Hobart After Dark, and Gigantic Sequins.

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT BEING GIGANTIC      3

THE MEN WHO FLEW AWAY      6

THE GRANDMOTHERS      17

THE MIDWESTERN MAN      21

THE PROFESSORIAL ANTEATER RISES ABOVE & BEYOND HIS WORKING-CLASS BACKGROUND      31

THE SOUTH-BOUND TRAIN      35

THE GUAVA MAN      43

LOVE STORIES      60

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS      65

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT BEING GIGANTIC

after Minus the Bear

When you’re gigantic, no one appreciates your dancing, or trusts your coordination. They’re all so worried about their tiny little skulls.

When you’re gigantic, you lose respect for the trees. There’s just no reason to be in awe of what’s smaller than you. Even the tiny people underfoot are only worth watching when they blend together in droves & sway blue & white like the rolling waves of the ocean look when you wade in the middle of it, water up to your thighs, the cold prickle of coral breaking skin between your toes. Or when they flicker so green you want to lie down on your back & thrash in them like a puppy in a perfect field. The tiny people don’t like it when you do this. They tell you to stop in angry ways. They shout Earthquake or Meteor or Why, God? Why?

When you’re gigantic, it’s hard to make friends, even with the one tiny person who has settled on your ankle. Every day he learns a little more about his home, and you, still growing, learn a little less about his body. One day the tiny settler is discovered. The ankle-land is annexed. First, there are ten tiny people & then there are a hundred & they begin to climb. You feel your tiny settler protest, his tiny body swaying, but he is outnumbered. You imagine he looks up at you in apology, but at your size it’s hard to discern such features. The tiny colonists multiply, give birth to whole families on your calf, dig deep in your thighs with their fingers & toes, climbing higher & higher until they threaten to topple you, to bring their gigantic home crashing down.

When you’re gigantic, the speed of your growth surprises you. Suddenly you can’t feel the sharp bodies digging into muscle, the pinpricks on your skin. You can’t see the tiny people pointing & it hurts your neck to try. The oceans become buckets for your feet. Your swinging arm strobes the sun. One day none of this is true & the next day it is.

When you’re gigantic, you have lots of time to think about how gigantic you are. Once a tiny little person with a tiny little nose, you’re now an eclipse, brief & forgotten. There was a rush that came with size, new size, an unmatched feeling of power & dominion, but that allure is fleeting. Instead, what lingers is the thought of how unrecognizable you’ve become, how indistinct & mountainous. How the tiny people must stare & stare but really see nothing.

When you’re gigantic, you never stop growing. Everything you’ve ever known becomes a molecule & everything you’ve ever been is sky. You are bigger than sky. Your head pokes out the earth’s atmosphere & you gasp for air to fill those gigantic lungs. Your neck breaks through to the starry black & shoulders & arms quickly follow. Comets & asteroids shoot past like bullets, clipping your earlobes and fingertips, making great craters in your gigantic nose. You are picked apart, made smaller this way, shot at again & again until, like everything gigantic, you eventually crash.

When you’re gigantic, it’s hard to keep things in perspective. It’s easy to