Novel Slices Issue 4

By Novel Slices

Novel Slices is the only literary journal dedicated solely to novel excerpts. Twice a year, we publish new and early-career novelists who are the winners of our biannual contest in September/October and March/April.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Novel Slices
• Release date: Jun 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088043783

Book preview

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Novel Slices

Issue Four

Cover Artwork

by Rachel Grubman

Subscriptions for two issues annually are:

$20/year, digital format (pdf or epub) or

$30/year for print issues

See our website for more info:

www.novelslices.com/issues

Twice annually, Novel Slices publishes the five winners of our novel excerpt contest. Entries can be made in March/April and September/October each year through our website at www.novelslices.com/contest

Novel Slices is a member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) and follows their contest code of ethics. The copyright for each excerpt reverts immediately after publication to the author.

Contest Judge      Jeanne Mackin

Founding Editor      Hardy Griffin

Associate Editor      Stephanie Johnson

Editorial Interns      Megan Handley

Emily Fischer

Chloe Eberhard

Social Media Intern      Rachel Grubman

All seven excerpts in this issue are equal first-place winners in the Novel Slices contest. The editors have chosen the order here solely for the flow of subjects and styles.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Note      1

The Disaster Society      2

by Kristina Garvin

The Judas Horse      21

by Obren Bokich

Blasphemy!      41

by P.K. Gardner

Displaced      62

by Olivia Kate Cerrone

It Ain’t Real      83

by Remy J. Alan

The War of the Buntings      104

by Matt Poll

Antidote      123

by Jonathan Berzer

Biographies      140

Contest Finalists      142

Supporters      143

Editor’s Note

Over 800 novelists shared their work with us in the latest contest—a truly amazing number. The entire team and our contest judge were humbled, repeatedly, by the quality and variety of this outpouring of imagination. In place of our usual five winners, we felt we simply had to publish seven excerpts.

In this issue, The Disaster Society focuses on a cursed family, while The Judas Horse is a wonderful blend of Western and Romance. Another genre-bender is Blasphemy!, a forensic Mystery with a taste of Umbrella-Academyesque Sci-Fi. Then Displaced takes us back to 1950s Boston and into a violent scene of gentrification, while the Southern Gothic feel of It Ain’t Real offers up a thousand different sinister possibilities. The geography shifts even more radically to North Korea for The War of the Buntings, where Minho has gone AWOL and is being pursued. Anchoring the group, our seventh excerpt, Antidote, explores the half-hallucinatory world of Crescent Bay, where Keith and others wrestle with what it means to be a prisoner in one’s own body.

This issue wouldn’t exist but for the unflagging energy and efforts of our Associate Editor, Stephanie Johnson, as well as our incredible interns from Ithaca College’s Writing Program and Communications School.

We also have wonderful news from past winners—both The Blue Bar by Damyanti Biswas, and What the Body Remembers by Rebecca Keller will be published soon, and three other winners now have literary agent representation.

We hope you enjoy the excerpts here, and as always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts. Wishing you a very good summer.

—Hardy

The Disaster Society

Kristina Garvin

I. Linden

We spent a lot of time that year deciding what to do with the living room wall. We couldn’t remember the exact color the wall had been before our parents died the year before, leaving us in a city that hated us, and even if we’d been able to remember, we weren’t sure if we wanted it the same color. Joe and I tried beige and green. We tried cerulean blue, cornflower blue, and pale blue-green. Joe thought about wallpaper—not the flowery type but the safe kind you see in a doctor’s office. He couldn’t make up his mind.

We’ve already spent too much money, Dan, he said. Cans of paint sat unused in the basement.

This shouldn’t cost that much, I agreed. But we needed to cover up the mess someone had made when they’d broken into our house and fucked the wall up. Vandalism, the police called it. Revenge, Joe and I said to one another. For what our parents had done.

During the week we worked different jobs. In those days I was still making a half-assed attempt at becoming a vet tech, taking classes and working part-time laying shingles. Joe did yardwork in Grove City when he wasn’t tutoring GED students at the library. Even then, there was time spent at home together, long evenings lying on the floor, watching TV and trying to will fans to spin better air into the house. It was 2002 and the economy sucked. When I broke my wrist tossing my supplies into the back of a truck, Joe wouldn’t allow me to fill a prescription for pain pills. Too expensive was the reason he gave me, but we both knew the real reason—our family’s penchant for spectacular substance-glazed exits. An uncle who fell out a window. A grandfather who might have blown up a coalmine. Our parents, who could have bothered to sober up at the bar before driving home. Instead they took a wrong turn onto the interstate, head-on into traffic.

Nice of Joe to care, really.

How the fuck did you break your wrist? He was perched on the sofa behind me.

I lay on the floor, clutching my wrist, not caring that my eyes and nose were leaking. I could hear him light a cigarette.

On TV, a kids’ movie. Ferngully.

They prescribed pain pills for a reason, I said, pissed that Joe had managed to nab the prescription while he led me from the emergency room to his car. He’d probably torched it when I wasn’t looking.

Such a pissbaby.

I’ll get nerve damage. Fuck your nerve damage.

The pain lessened the next day but still pissed me off. I went down to the basement to find my mother’s paintbrushes, which she’d left in a box next to the washing machine and tried not to remember how she sounded when she told the story of moving here from Southeastern Ohio as a teenager, how she was a hick, the only person at school who listened to country music. Instead I thought about how it was lucky I’d broken my left wrist, not my right, so I could paint something obscene on the living room wall. Between me and Joe, I was the only one with artistic ability, and that wasn’t saying much.

By the time I was climbing the stairs I was thinking I’d paint some cartoon characters from the stupid kids’ movies he watched constantly. Rabbits and birds and shit. I’d give them humanoid junk and draw cartoon bubbles above their heads criticizing his fuckass austerity measures. Then I’d invite our friend Petey over. We’d get high and laugh about Joe.

But when I sat in front of the wall, I started painting something different. The street. The neighborhood. St. James the Less Church—where we’d gone to elementary school before we’d been split up, with Joe going to a public and me getting a scholarship to Catholic school. St. James had a brick steeple and flowering gardens, so I used the light brown and green paint we’d bought the week before, and one of the various shades of blue to paint Cleveland Avenue, the main thoroughfare that held strip malls, pawn shops, boxy apartment complexes, and the Somali-owned clothing and grocery shops, halal markets, and store-front mosques that had recently sprung up. What people had begun to call Little Somalia.

I was losing him then—not all at once like I lost my parents, but more like I lost Jean: little by little. I’d lose him first to Little Somalia and then to the military and then to Iraq—and then to the world beyond the world.

Maybe I painted the mural because I knew he’d leave, and I was trying to show him why he shouldn’t.

I was etching the sign that stood near the beginning of Linden—HARD WORK IS PRIDE—when Joe walked in. Huh, he said.

Joe’s reactions were always quiet but overstated: whispered rage at a man who crossed the street too slowly, a migraine over an unpaid electric bill. One time, when a girl dumped him to go back to the father of her baby, he shaved his head.

I’ll paint over it, I said.

He paused. I looked up at him from the floor, noticing that the ceiling fan swept the wet tendrils away from his forehead. He’d walked home from the library in the rain—two miles. His eyes were soft and a little dazed, a reminder of my mother’s stare when I surprised her by doing something well, something that told her Linden wouldn’t own me. Joe was only eleven months older than I was, but sometimes he seemed younger and other times much, much older. He hated me, and I resented him just for being there—but he had her stare. How long did it take you?

Two hours.

He took two steps toward me and bent forward to observe the shape things were taking. Keep going.

*

The Somali immigrants were the only people Columbus hated more than my family.

They started coming here in the mid-nineties. They lived among us, opening car repair and oil change places first, and then restaurants and coffee shops. They were quiet and inconspicuous, their long clothes a whisper. They didn’t smoke or drink. The children followed their parents, their immaculate clothes copies of the dark robes and shirts their parents wore— except on weekends, when the women dressed more festively, wearing bright colors while still covering their hair. We heard they lived in tribal groups that occupied apartment complexes near Northern Lights with a Somali overlord who didn’t let anyone in or out except for members of the tribe. At least that’s what Petey told us, but Petey was often full of shit.

They’d fled a civil war for our corner of the city. North Linden was known for its careless sprawl and depleted strip malls, so few people cared that Somalis moved in; few people bitched publicly about property values tanking or empty storefronts used as mosques. The neighborhood hadn’t ever been nice—not really—and the only people who got salty were the olds who remembered when Cleveland Avenue had a trolly car. Neighborhood leaders praised the Somalis’ work ethic as they pulled the business corridor back from the brink; councilmembers gave speeches about how welcoming Columbus was, how true we remained to our traditions. A century ago, we’d made room for Germans and Italians—now the Somalis were the beneficiaries of our generosity.

That’s some horseshit, Jean Killian said when I told her about the Somalis. High school girlfriend, at college near Cincinnati. Smart. For the past four years we kept in touch, trading letters and emails and the rare phone call. Occasionally she came to visit.

She said, No one knows jackshit about our traditions. During World War I, people burned down half of German Village. Then they killed all the German Shepherds.

Jean was the sort of person who hoarded information and got fired up by historical inaccuracies. Senior year she was voted most likely to write a book no one would understand.

Like, literally. They took German Shepherds away from their owners and hacked them to death.

Her visits had grown less frequent in the last couple years. Her father was long dead and her mother lived elsewhere. When Jean came home to Columbus, she stayed with extended family, and I got the sense the relationship sucked. As the years progressed, I didn’t see her much: Her life took off while mine swirled down the crapper. I’d started college at OSU but had lasted only two quarters. Transferred to Columbus State—the community college—and didn’t fare much better.

I’d once wanted to be a veterinarian. Now I knew how asinine the goal had been: I’d barely gotten a C-minus in high school chemistry, and the highest math I’d taken was Algebra II.

I got into Ohio State—they admitted almost anyone—but they sure as shit didn’t accept me to Arts and Sciences. I got shuffled to a catch-all program for undecideds called exploration.

Keep trying, Jean emailed. When I told her I was gonna aim for vet tech instead, she said, That’s great! You can always go back once you know what you’re in for. And at least you’ll save yourself the