Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories

By Janice Deal

In Janice Deal's linked story collection STRANGE ATTRACTORS, everyday people navigate the uncertainties of life in the American heartland, seeking order in chaos with a very human mix of resilience and folly.

At first glance, the fictional Ephrem, Illinois, seems a friendly, familiar town: it draws you right in, even if you don't need supplies at the mall or a snack at Brat Station. But as you come closer, you discover people who are complex and unpredictable. Life itself is capricious, and loneliness can turn a person strange. Past traumas linger. Illness sometimes falls like a hammer. Yet there's much affection here, small and large examples of human kindness.

For years, Janice Deal has been publishing these award-winning stories about Ephrem. Now assembled for the first time, these extraordinary tales offer a masterful snapshot of life in today's small-town America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Door Books
• Release date: Dec 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781735558554

Janice Deal

Janice Deal is the author of a novel, THE SOUND OF RABBITS (Regal House Publishing, 2023), and two short story collections: THE DECLINE OF PIGEONS (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013), and a linked collection, STRANGE ATTRACTORS (New Door Books, 2023). She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose, and is currently working on a new collection of short stories.

Book preview

Advance Praise for

Strange Attractors

"Ephrem, Illinois, is America, with its winking welcome lights that don’t stay on all night, its jaunty, sinister mall, and its legendary lake-fish, ‘Jingles.’ The characters in these linked stories will unsettle you, and break your heart—some by the depths of their courage, and others by the moments they break, becoming unwitting agents of change. Hope and fear will grip you in equal measure. Flannery O’Connor would recognize and applaud the vivid, muscular prose and powerful vision of Janice Deal." —  Marjorie Sandor, author of Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime (Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction), and others

"Not since the abrupt—and welcome—rediscovery of Lucia Berlin’s short fictions in 2015 have I read such a marvelous story collection as Janice Deal’s Strange Attractors. In a quietly luminous and deceptively steady voice, Deal mines the lives and burdens of the generally overlooked citizens of Ephrem, Illinois, a semi-rural community college town near the Wisconsin border. She makes her gallery of strangers our intimates in the way Willa Cather once did." —  James Magruder, author of Vamp Until Ready

"In the tradition of Winesburg, Ohio, this hauntingly beautiful collection of linked stories by Janice Deal features vivid, unforgettable characters inhabiting the fictional town of Ephrem, Illinois. This is a town where smart people read string theory but may not be headed for college, where teenagers itch to leave but can’t fully escape, where many struggle with demons—alcohol, income insecurity, and reputations seared into the collective memory. The stories in this collection ask the question: Can we ever really leave home? In Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories, Deal has created her own strange attractor, a world that pulls the reader in and leaves an indelible mark." —  Jan English Leary, author of Thicker Than Blood, Skating on the Vertical, and Town and Gown

Welcome to Ephrem, a Midwestern town so minutely ­imagined by Janice Deal that you’re sure to recognize someone you’ve known—and to wonder why you never noticed how interesting they actually are. Even the awful people (and there are a couple) have their moments; but most of the denizens of Deal’s stories are just trying to do their best, sometimes managing to surprise themselves—but always managing to make us wonder at their antics and misfortune and occasional good luck, and to believe it all wholeheartedly, because of the author’s subtle and seductive art, as deceptively simple-seeming as the very best magic. —  Ellen Akins, author of Home Movie, World Like a Knife, and others

"In Strange Attractors, Janice Deal masterfully captures a certain type of American small-town life: ‘a suburb in the country, if you can picture that.’ Here, a lonely mother fights to stay sober by enrolling in a class on string theory at the community college, and a drifter falls into reverential silence recalling the brilliant colors of Faygo pop. Deal writes with empathy and unflinching wisdom about life’s existential yearnings, and she is both honest and skillful enough to send her characters to dying malls and franchise restaurants in search of answers. I am grateful for this collection. It is radiantly true." —  Ginger Eager, author of The Nature of Remains

"Reading Strange Attractors, I felt a growing tenderness and respect for Janice Deal’s brave, solitary, and often wounded characters. In her elegy to a small Midwestern town, Deal somehow encapsulates whole worlds—in fragile moments of connection, life-alter­ing actions, and stoic contemplation. These wondrous stories will stay with me; I know I’ll pick them up again and again." —  Katherine Shonk, author of The Red Passport and Happy Now?

The map is the first clue to the delights that this remarkable collection offers (look for Babymaker, honey hole, Candy­maker/QuickFry!). There are so many pleasures in Janice Deal’s immersive storytelling—rich and tasty details, unerring language, subversive humor. The people of Ephrem have fates as surprising and inevitable as a turtle in a Jacuzzi. It is a rare treat to walk among them. —  Kathy Anderson, author of The New Town Librarian

"With an honest and empathetic eye, Janice Deal mines the everyday and familiar for the extraordinary and sublime. The stories in Strange Attractors are quietly powerful, linked by a strong sense of place, yet each character is complicated and singular and richly drawn. I was absorbed from beginning to end." —  Elise Juska, author of If We Had Known, The Blessings, and others

Imagine you’re flying over a small town in the heart of America—modest houses, a strip mall, an industrial park edged with low apartment complexes and corn fields—then you dive in close. A roof lifts off and you are inside that home, caught up with characters in the moment when bad decisions and bad luck set everything asunder. Imagine the surprise, the breathlessness you’ll feel, and the sympathy. That’s what you’ll experience reading Janice Deal’s Ephrem stories. One after another, these stories will grip you. A little boy longing for his grandmother encounters an old woman who is anything but grandmotherly; a woman facing homelessness hopes to enrich her life with a college course in string theory; the fierce mother of a murderous teenager struggles to find a way forward. Probing what’s hidden within her characters, the unmet yearning, obsessions, and despair, Deal exposes the tragic disconnect between dreamy hopes and harsh reality. These inventive stories of intersecting, calamitous lives are searing, streaked with comedy, and unforgettable. —  Lynn Sloan, author of the novels Midstream and Principles of Navigation and the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough

"The characters that populate Janice Deal’s immersive linked collection Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories are so fully rendered—so alive—that I had to keep reminding myself this is a book of fiction. The same can be said for the working-class suburban setting of Ephrem, Illinois. In vivid prose full of sensory-rich details (the food descriptions had me craving an array of snacks), Deal crafts characters and situations that are relatable and yet wholly unique, effortlessly blending pathos, humor, and, at times, shock. The breadth of characters, which range from young child to idiosyncratic widow, overlap not only geographically, but in their curiosity about the world and their deep desire for connection. My one regret was that, on the last page, I had to depart the town of Ephrem, although I can guarantee its quirky, empathetic residents won’t be exiting my thoughts anytime soon." —  Marcie Roman, author of Journey to the Parallels, winner of the Kraken Book Prize

Other Books by Janice Deal

The Decline of Pigeons (stories)

The Sound of Rabbits (novel)

NEW DOOR BOOKS

An imprint of P. M. Gordon Associates, Inc.

2115 Wallace Street

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19130

U.S.A.

Copyright © 2023 by Janice Deal

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 reviews.

Cover photograph © Tamara Adams | Dreamstime.com

Cover design and map by John Hensler

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance herein to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023930852

ISBN 978-1-7355585-4-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7355585-5-4 (e-book)

To David and Marion Apollo

AND

In memory of Marion and Norman A. Kenney

This One Is Okay

for MS and Veronica

After Grant died, Looie had some time on her hands.

All those months Grant was getting sicker and sicker, and Looie never told anyone, but she used to sometimes think that it would be a relief when he was gone. He’d always had such a generous spirit, but in the end he got mean. Cancer did that to a person. Didn’t it?

But now he’s gone and there’s just the raised ranch they moved into as newlyweds. The grass outside is long and rank, with bald patches, but when she gets back from the Jewel-Osco, or last week the post office, she feels a comfort. She likes her yellow kitchen, the way light moves across the linoleum tiles on the floor. It happens in an instant; it takes all day. Sometimes the house, and her life in it, don’t seem of the world.

"My life, it’s extramundane," she says to her best friend Hannah-Grace on the phone, and Hannah-Grace snorts. When Grant was very ill, Looie started looking up a new word every day. It cheered her to pull the old dictionary from the shelf; the book had been a gift from her parents when she turned 12. They had been so gracious that way: receiving a dictionary, a good pen, decent luggage, had all been rites of passage for Looie. She and Grant had tried at first to continue this tradition with their own son, Brett, but somewhere along the way it seems they’d gotten tired.

Then Brett went away to college and Looie found, at an estate sale, a microprint edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. What a thing it was! Every page of the 20-volume set was shrunk down to the size of a playing card, so that the whole dictionary fit in two volumes set snugly in a cardboard slipcase.

Can you imagine? Looie had called Grant from the gravel backyard of the estate. It wasn’t really an estate; it was a split-level with vinyl siding. But the dictionary, organized so that each page held nine of the tiny playing-card-sized pages, was cunning and thus, to Looie’s way of thinking, beautiful. She had always, herself, wanted to be thought of as cunning and beautiful.

We don’t need any more crap, Grant said. But he sounded resigned; it was as though he already knew.

Looie went back to the owner of the house, or at least the woman who was managing the sale. She wore red bellbottoms, like she didn’t care, and she had brass balls, that one; Looie had seen a young couple try to bargain her down on a square ottoman upholstered in stained nubuck. Quite a little crowd gathered around them as they bickered back and forth, but in the end, the couple slunk away.

I can’t read this, Looie informed the woman. She had laid the dictionary down with a reverent thud, having lugged it to the card table where the woman sat with her cash box. When the woman told her she’d need a magnifying glass to read the text, Looie informed her that there wasn’t one. The little drawer at the top of the case was empty. "You’re getting the OED for $50, the woman said. And you want a magnifying glass?"

Looie, who did want a magnifying glass but wanted the book more, thought of the ottoman couple. They were probably driving home, legs sticking to plastic seats, the trunk of their car empty. They had probably imagined their return in a different way. So she bought the OED as it was, without a magnifier, telling the woman in the bellbottoms that the book was for her son. But when she got home she changed her mind and put it on the tall shelf next to her childhood dictionary. Sometimes she looks at the works—thick and then thicker—and she imagines them as friends. Even after she scares up an old magnifying glass of Grant’s to use for reading the OED, she doesn’t always use it; sometimes it’s enough to think of the world of words inside.

After college, Brett returned to Illinois. He never moved back home, but he lives in Ephrem like Looie does, and still comes by the house to check on her. He has his own life: there’s Jeannie and the twins, and his job, which has something to do with technology. Looie has a smartphone and she repeats what Brett has told her when she talks about him with her friends: He’s into mobile apps, is what she says. No one Looie knows wants to admit that they don’t know what she’s talking about—or maybe they really do know—so she’s spared having to explain something she doesn’t understand herself.

Besides, she’s the grieving widow, and everyone treads lightly around her, as if maybe she too were ill or her head were something fragile, like spun sugar. She has asked Hannah-Grace not to come by the house, but last month they met at the food court in the Ephrem Mall. This was Looie’s idea; she left the car in the garage and took the bus instead. It was easy! There were so many characters on the bus: people in tracksuits; one gentleman with a furuncle on his neck, barely hidden by his collar. He sat next to her and Looie smiled brightly, then looked away. She watched the strip malls and the Jiffy Lube sail by the window and thought it might make the man feel good, her not staring at his neck, at what was obviously ugly. She was wearing her best shoes, which were, she noticed once she got outside, a strange color in the sunlight. The suede had been spoiled by water damage when the roof leaked last spring. Looie walked briskly from the bus into the mall, then ordered a burger and fries at the food court, which was decorated like a circus. She ate everything as if starved.

You’re certainly hungry, dear. Hannah-Grace is a kind woman, whose broad soft face gains definition when she frowns. Looie, who sometimes wonders whether Hannah-Grace really enjoys her company anymore, levered a greasy finger at her friend.

"Our relationship is defined by commensalism, she said. That was around the time she’d stopped caring what anyone thought. I don’t do you any harm. There’s that." She licked her fingers, suddenly grumpy, and when Hannah-Grace offered her a ride home, she took it.

Looie isn’t sure what the statute of limitations is for grief; some schools of thought insist on a year, but there are those who draw the line at six months. Grant died in July; pretty soon Looie will be forced to consider whether to dig out the box of Christmas decorations. She’ll need Brett’s help but it’s hard to know when he’ll come by. Sons are like that.

So when the squirrel worms down the chimney and runs around the living room, leaving a tracery of sooty paw prints, Looie isn’t dismayed so much as interested. She’s sitting in the La-Z-Boy with her dictionary in her lap when the squirrel lands in the ashy grate. It’s a Gray, narrow and disheveled. Its tail looks like a broom brush. It has a crooked leg.

Hello, Looie says to the squirrel. Its eyes glint, shiny as hematite. For days she tries to entice it