The Wrong Side of the River and Other Points of Interest: A Novella and Short Fiction

By Brian Price, Evie Brosius and Alicia Price Baxter

It’s almost the end of the world, so what are you going to do about it except keep trying to cross the river, keep wrestling with invasive species, and keep looking for home even if it’s on the other side of the universe? Comic, poetic, kind of slippery, and oddly speculative, this collection of short fiction, poetry, and a novella by Great Northern Audio Theatre producer and playwright Brian Price is sure to round out anyone’s stockpile of pre-, near-, and/or post-apocalyptic literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387962273

Book preview

The Wrong Side of the River and Other Points of Interest:

A Novella and Short Fiction

Brian Price

THE WRONG SIDE OF THE RIVER AND OTHER POINTS OF INTEREST: A NOVELLA AND SHORT FICTION

Copyright © 2022 Brian Price.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-387-96227-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022909227

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

Editing and design by Evie Brosius. 

Cover illustration by Alicia Price Baxter.

Published by Brian Price. Indianapolis, IN.

Printed in the United States of America.

Performance and Publishing Credits

Understanding

From Brain of Many Rooms – a collection of new sound poetry featuring works by Marjorie Van Halteren, Brian Price, Ilaria Boffa, Tony Brewer, and Jeff Gburek, broadcast on electroacousticalpoeticalsociety.com, Lille, France, 25 March 2022

At the End of 17th Street

From You Can’t Go Home Again – a collection of poetry featuring works by Marjorie Van Halteren, Brian Price, Ilaria Boffa, Tony Brewer, and Jeff Gburek, broadcast on electroacousticalpoeticalsociety.com, Lille, France, 1 October 2021

The Wrong Side of the River: A Novella

Audiobook Edition

Written, directed, and edited by Brian Price 

Performed by Robin Miles

Released by Blackstone Publishing, October 2021

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The Entire Great Northern Audio Theatre catalogue, including the audiobook version of The Wrong Side of the River: A Novella, is available on: http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Brian+Price

For a complete listing of all Great Northern Audio Theatre productions and information about audio theatre in general, please visit: http://www.greatnorthernaudio.com/

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Other Books by Brian Price:

The Old Cart Wrangler, The New Silence, and Other Notions: Monologues and Short Fiction

For my mother,

Sue Dayton Price (1932-1981)

Foreword

In this novella and in these stories and poems, the hopelessly and sometimes hilariously ordinary world collides with the wild and unexpected. These are fables told in idiosyncratic detail and polished, character-driven dialog. Take a good look around, but take your time, reader—it doesn’t do to roar through these generous landscapes with haste, but rather pace yourself, so you can savour the marvelous, meticulous observations, giving yourself fully to the ride and all its unexpected turns along the way. 

Around each corner will appear a question: what if the only room left in the world is the church basement? What is on the other side of the river? Is there actually another side to the river? What if they built a giant slingshot to find out?

Brian Price’s world is fundamentally one of a deep, aching Americana. For all his wit and humor, it starts with the heartland. Like Mark Twain or Stanley Elkin, Price has his feet firmly and unapologetically planted in the great flyover USA we all know so well, where the familiar meets the absurd and fantastic. Here he digs in and mines his subject, sowing his carefully syncopated rhythms with understated dry humor, often blowing a quick snark-dart that whizzes past the ear just in case your attention wandered.

Half of his world is peeling away, while the other half plays blackjack. Schools of giant fish saunter into bars, toasters provide miraculous transformations, a local call-in radio station is the tip of a scary iceberg, and the very geography of a continent is up for grabs. It’s safe, it’s broken, it’s not on fire.

Is it sci-fi, near-fi, now-fi, not-fi…or why-not-fi? In fact—it defies all the fi’s—it is just pure imagination, inspired by where we’ve been, a deep concern for where we’re going, and a clear-eyed testament of where we are.

Marjorie Van Halteren

Lille, France

Introduction

The Wrong Side of the River always felt like a place I just wandered into. Went down a path and there it was—like it had always been there. Kind of dark, kind of slippery, kind of speculative—like a painting by Thomas Cole or a story by Hamlin Garland. Like standing on Monk’s Mound at Cahokia. I felt like I knew the language and customs. I’d ask one of the characters how to get across the river, and they’d give me one answer. So, I’d ask another character, and they’d give me a different answer. I just kept doing that. I didn’t mind not knowing. I just liked standing in the dead leaves and mud on the side of the river.

It felt like I’d found the place just in time. It felt like if I’d just gone halfway, and turned around and walked back up the path to the road, and then turned back around, and followed the path again, I wouldn’t have found the river. All the places in these stories are like that. I just found them. It felt like they’d always been there, but you could easily have just walked on by. You could easily have missed them, and there’d be nothing. That’s what these places are. These are the places you find just before there’s nothing.

These stories are about endings. The end of relationships. The end of fish. The end of water. The end of the world. What else is there to talk about?

I don’t think this book is apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. I think it’s pre-apocalyptic. It’s about dealing with change. It’s about adaptation. Changes are going to come. Many purveyors of the apocalyptic like to think that the end of the world will be less human, less emotional, and become more and more inhuman—zombies, zombies, zombies. All those zombies. I disagree. I think the end of the world will make us more human. We’ll hurt more. We’ll desire more. We’ll fail more. We’ll love more.

That doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to get a little weird, a little surreal. A little funny—not quite ha-ha funny—just funny. That’s a given. Ask any supermodel who has fallen in love with a giant fish. 

Brian Price

Plainfield, Indiana

April 2022

The Wrong Side of the River and Other Points of Interest:

A Novella and Short Fiction

Brian Price

The Wrong Side of the River

2021

The Wrong Side

I’M ON THE WRONG SIDE of the river. Ain’t that always the way?

I’m looking across. I’ve been peering across a long time. Six months, eight months, ten years. Who knows? You can almost see it through the mist, the place I want to get. The place we all want to get. The other side of the river. 

There’ve been other places I’ve looked across. In vain. Without result. Vicksburg. Cairo, or whatever’s left of it. Most of it’s underwater, submerged, sunk. East St. Louis, which was a swamp, still is, just kind of more of a deeper swamp. And then there’s Dubuque. They say the river is twenty-five miles wide in places along through there. Twenty-five miles wide. Even if the mist turned clear you couldn’t see across. 

So, I made my way up here. And still, I’m on the wrong side of the river.

This guy, the first day I got in, said he had something to tell me. He looked over his shoulder. He looked up and down the wet boulevard. He looked at the towheaded, smudgy little boy scratching his arm, looking at us. The guy put his big arm over my shoulder and pulled me around the corner. He acted like he didn’t want to be seen. He whispered like he didn’t want to be heard. He said to me, I can get you across.

I said, Well, that’s great. That’s just great. When?

As soon as I get a boat, he said. He smiled. He yanked up his waders and buttoned up his houndstooth sport coat. It was a sport coat that made him look like the assistant coach of a rural tri-county football team. It was a coat that made it look like maybe he didn’t like wearing sport coats. The coat was a size or two too small, but he was a big man, a size or two too big, and everything looked a size or two too small on him. See you around, he said. Don’t you follow me. He pointed at the boy. The boy followed. They walked off through the mud and the mist. Plenty of mud. Plenty of mist. They mix together, the mist and the mud.

The Town With No Name

ALONG THE BANKS of the muddy Mississippi up along here a little village has grown. Popped up. Sprung. Grown up to be a town, maybe a burg. That’s what they say. It’s a village where they wait, not only to get across the river, but they just wait. We all wait with them. There’s a lot of waiting going on around here.

This village has no name. 

On the second day I was here, I asked the guy in the waders and houndstooth check sport coat, the boatman without a boat, What is this place? Where are we?

He said, You’re here.

And I said, I know where I am. I just wanna know what it’s called.

You’re here. That’s all you need to know, the boatman without a boat shrugged. He told the towheaded boy to move along. The towheaded boy shrugged.

What if I wanted to tell somebody else where I am?

All they need to know is that they’re not here.

Where are they, then, if they’re not here? I asked.

Somewhere else.

What if they wanted to be here? If they wanted to make a visit?

Nobody wants to be here, he said.

So, you’re not going to name off the name of this town?

Can’t, the boatman said.

Why not?

It doesn’t have a name.

Seems a bit inconvenient, I pointed out.

If it had a name, it would wash away. They always do.

Now, one could immediately put this down as a mild form of superstition, but facts are facts, and the facts are that, at least in the last four-five-six-seven years since the cracks began, every town along the banks of the Mississippi, at least on the east side where we are at present, has disappeared. Every town. If the town had a sign saying population 2,331, if there was band shell just across from the mayor’s office and a bait shop just across the tracks, if that town had a bowling alley next to the VFW and a church that shared a parking lot with the Piggly Wiggly, if that town had an old leaning dock just hanging above the water, if that town had a name on a map and official GPS coordinates, that town no longer exists. They were all washed away. Every one of those towns was picked up and carried and dragged along with the silt and the sand and the mud and the mist through two thousand miles of spinning eddies and broken levees, past New Orleans and out to the Gulf of Mexico. 

And what did all those towns have in common? Every last one of those towns had a proud name and has since floated away. So, you do have to admit that not naming the town seems like a sensible precaution.

Nothing has been the same since the river broke.

That was a lot to get a hold of on a Thursday, which was the second day after the day I had arrived.

The River Is So Wide

(THEY SING THIS SONG. You can hear it floating over the currents. You can hear it getting caught in the low-hanging branches. They hum it when they are knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist-deep at the edge of the river, peering across.)

I cry and I cry and I cry, I believe my baby’s on the other side.

I try and I try and I try, but the river’s so wide.

I cry and I cry and I cry, is this where I’ll always stay?

On the wrong, wrong side. Ain’t that always the way?

Oh, I cry and I cry, I’ve just gotten so lost.

I don’t know what I’ll find if I ever get across.

I’ve gone about as far as I can go.

I’ve seen about as much as I can see.

I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know.

I’m about as sorry as I can be.

I cry and I cry and I cry, I believe my baby’s on the other side.

I try and I try and I try, but the river’s so wide.

Once I could see, I could see through the mist.

Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you get kissed.

Oh, they say that—you better, better be brave,

’Cause you never know if this old river will behave.

I know where I wish I could go.

I wish I lived in the sky.

I would look down on the river below, 

and cry baby, cry baby, cry baby, cry.

I cry and I cry and I cry, I believe my baby’s on the other side.

I try and I try and I try, but the river’s so wide.

Oh, the river’s so wide, the river’s so wide.

— Anonymous Traveler

The Gonna Do

WHATCHA GONNA DO when you do get across?

I’m gonna look for my daughter, the girl in a brown coat said. She had a sad beauty. I’m a sucker for sad beauty. She was maybe about half my age—twenty-one, twenty-two. She must’ve had her baby when she was practically a baby herself. And how did she end up on this side of the river with her baby getting stuck on the other side? What was that