The Rail
Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from our favorite emerging writers
12/17/2021 0 Comments The Second Storm, by Keltie ZubkoDear Readers, Happy Friday! It's been a real bear of a week for all of us but hopefully we can turn off our climate, pandemic, and political anxiety for a few moments to enjoy the newest piece in our Intimacy series. This week we're featuring a beautiful and haunting story from Canadian writer Keltie Zubko. We wish you a safe and healthy weekend, and we'll see you next week-- The Derailleur Press team P.S. our upcoming fiction chap is available for preorder now! Visit our store to reserve yours today. It’s a good thing these storms only come every twenty years.
This one began as the last one had, lulling us at first with intricate pieces of frozen lace that spun and drifted hypnotically from the sky. Luscious and light, they grew imperceptibly weighty, lost definition and became dense splotches that piled up on every surface. Time distorted and warped so that soon we found ourselves in a tight, silent cocoon, forced to stop and look wide-eyed at each other, wondering how we got here. Who would have thought snow could do all that? When it started this time, I remembered that other storm. That one, the last big Pacific Northwest storm struck when our kids were little and before my husband died, a confluence of forces from sky and sea, extremes of temperature and moisture, dumping several feet of heavy, wet snow in mere hours. It was more than we could handle. Our city had limited snow removal equipment and our inhabitants lacked the skills or experience to drive in it. It mocked and tested our blasé west coast attitude. We didn’t need or own windshield scrapers and winter boots here meant rain boots. While the four-wheel drive owners frolicked in it, most of us hunkered in and waited it out. At least it taught us the virtue of loving the ones we were isolated with. But this time I waited alone atop the hill at the end of our street, watching it arrive with no other face to mirror mine. This time, I knew the choice: solitude in the eventual power outage, no one to hold my hand and trace my scars in the darkness, or I could seek some other storm. I could, perhaps, answer the call to blood and bone that still lived, the glance of understanding or tone of voice that leapt across the gap between life and death. I could, I thought, make one last bold drive through the white night of a blizzard and find someone to face it with me.
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12/14/2021 0 Comments ten, by Adam BerlinDear Readers, As we plow through toward the New Year, we want to thank each and every one of you for sticking by our press as we continue to champion new work! We're starting off this week with something a little different than we've published before. Adam Berlin's ten is sexy and seductive, but also cheeky sly and cheeky. This piece is perfect for fans of Adele Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. and will leave you feeling a certain way. We're publishing this series on Intimacy to celebrate the upcoming release of our fiction chapbook in the new year! Preorder your copy today! -Derailleur Press She’s doing the same thing I’m doing, sort of.
After rapid back-and-forth emails (biography questions and answers, banter to prove we can banter), she tells me she’s studying writing. I tell her I teach writing. She sends an email with a selfie attached—she’s standing in front of a mirror wearing a summer skirt that shows off thin, strong legs. Her face is smudged by the indoor flash. I send her a jacket photo looking starving-artist moody. She finally admits it. She posted on Craigslist to get material for a story. She’s taking a Lyrical Essay course and wants to collect as many emails as possible, then make them into a verbal collage. I email her a question. What exactly is a lyrical essay? She emails back, I don’t fully know. I tell her I like Hemingway, Spartan and simple, and she tells me she likes Joyce and David Foster Wallace and Rankine and Jean Toomer and plenty of others in between, which makes her, she assumes, less lyrically-challenged. I ask how her lyrical essay is coming along. She says she’s received too many responses. She asks why I answered her post, beyond the obvious. I tell her I’m writing a story of my own. About the thrills of Craigslist dating? she writes. Thrilled to meet you, I write back. I leave the rest out—that I plan to bed ten different women from CL in ten days. I’m from the write-what-you-know school of fiction. I live it, then tweak it, shaping reality to get across theme. 12/10/2021 0 Comments Recovery, by Gracie BialeckiDear Readers, Thank you for joining us for the latest addition to our Intimacy series! I'm pleased as punch to share Gracie Bialecki's Recovery, a beautiful story about art, relationships, and letting your past go. We also wanted to share that our upcoming fiction chapbook Late Stage is coming out in January 2022! Visit our store to preorder yours today. Happy reading! - Derailleur Press We came by plane then boat, sun-drunk by the time we made our way to the villa. We pulled bags up worn stone stairways and down ancient alleys, arriving with the nonchalance of those who have done this before, who know what to carry and what to leave behind.
I’d arrived from Ibiza with only a backpack. The flight was so easy there was no reason to say no to Elliot’s invitation. At school, he and his friends were called The Intellectuals — studying philosophy or art history and dabbling in esoteric drugs. He’d been the one who organized lavish parties, which had grown from dorms, to rented Victorians, to his family’s island home. His twenty-seventh birthday was an excuse to throw another, and of course, he would. I was a year younger, but had already had enough brushes with the twenty-seven club to value survival over revelry. Elliot and I were both in Europe but he hadn’t seen me in years, and he was inviting the person he’d known — the party girl-turned-DJ who spun night into day. Still, his email was an unexpected gesture, and I took it as a sign of something shifting. Elliot didn’t mention me mixing, because we were friends. Friends who gathered on islands. Dear Readers, We're so pleased to publish this eerie story by former Derailleur Press writer Eirini Melena Karoutsos. This brilliantly eerie short story about the discomforts of intimacy is perfect for fans of Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and may just keep you up at night! Keep an eye on Derailleur Press's social media for upcoming announcements on our chapbook releases, and of course keep an eye on The Rail for more brilliant writing each week. Happy reading! - Derailleur Press We were driving to his grandmother’s house. He wants me to meet her, while there is still time. Mark told me before we left that she had practically raised him. So, we were going over the river and through the woods except the woods are just miles of farmland and the river is a ditch that runs along the empty highway.
I can’t remember what time we started driving and my head aches from a hangover I don’t remember earning. Yesterday, Mark spent 45 minutes showing me the house on Google Maps. I watched the clock tick in mild awe of his feat, and yet the name of the town escapes me. I can’t ask, and Mark doesn’t have the GPS on. I try a few conversational gambits, but each dies in the sort of way that forced conversations tend to do when you don’t actually want to have them: painfully, and seemingly dragging away a piece of your soul with them. The silence between us is both familiar and oppressive, private and yet perverted. When Mark quotes a John Mulaney joke for the third time, I want to jump out of the car, but then I feel guilty for my extreme reaction. Instead, I fiddle with the knob on the radio again, searching for music. It spins under my fingers, making a faint clicking sound until I find a classic rock station, which feels wrong in winter, but eventually it too goes to static. Mark jumps and turns the radio off. “You might as well give it up.” Startled, it takes me a minute to realize he was talking about the radio. “I mean,” I respond, slightly flustered, “I’m sure there’s at least an oldies station somewhere.” At this point, I wouldn’t even have minded some Evangelical screaming about damnation, burning, and “the queers.” It would have been something new to talk about, or at least background noise. “It’s like a radio dead zone,” he says, and adds, “There’s absolutely nothing,” as though reading the fleeting thought on the tip of my tongue again. 11/26/2021 0 Comments Officially, Legally by Rachel LeónDear Readers, We were so excited and overwhelmed by the stories we received for our Intimacy chapbook that we had to share a few on The Rail! We're so pleased to publish this story by non-binary queer writer Rachel León. Whether you spent your long weekend with family, chosen family, or in solitude, we're certain you'll love this beautiful piece about the intimacies and intricacies of "unconventional" parenthood. Keep an eye on Derailleur Press's social media for upcoming announcements on our chapbook releases, and of course keep an eye on The Rail for more brilliant writing each week. Happy reading! - Derailleur Press Adrian can’t sleep, his mind running through the list of preparations: he picked up the balloons and cake that afternoon. The invitations were sent two weeks ago — digitally through social media and fifty-three glossy photo cards for close friends and family. Did he go overboard on the invites? His attorney said he could have as many people as he wanted. But he’ll probably need more ice for the party… and would there be enough to drink? He bought eight cases of soda in varying colors, caffeine levels, and diet-friendliness. Plus, water; people could always have water. But maybe he should grab some juice, too? He will when he gets the ice — a couple jugs of apple juice should be just fine. He wants everything perfect — tomorrow, Adrian will officially, legally, become a father to his son and daughter. *
Dear Readers, We were so excited and overwhelmed by the stories we received for our Intimacy chapbook that we had to share a few on The Rail! We're so pleased to publish this eerie speculative story by Spanish writer Santiago Eximeno (translation by Alicia L. Alonso). While first reading this piece, I was drawn to the uncanniness of it all. Like a vivid dream, every absurdity of this story feels too real to be true. I'm positive you're going to have just as much fun reading this as I did. Keep an eye on Derailleur Press's social media for upcoming announcements on our chapbook releases, and of course keep an eye on The Rail for more brilliant writing each week. Happy reading! - Derailleur Press I need a hug.
This was the first thought that crossed Elena’s mind when she walked into her doctor’s office. She was lonely. Peter had insisted on staying home with the girls, believing that they were too small to go to the hospital with her. They would get nervous and bother everyone, and they - Elena and Peter - would end up getting angry as well. But what Elena really saw in her husband’s behavior was fear, lots of fear. And selfishness. The same selfishness that made him avoid talking about her disease in front of the girls, as if not talking about it could make it go away. As if mentioning it would tarnish him and the girls. Elena, after all, was already tarnished. As she sat alone in the small waiting room, Elena felt – not for the first time - unconnected to her family, a family that valued fighting and playing games more than hard work, the kind of work that had to be done every day so that everything they thought they were entitled to would prevail. It was not because Peter got fired from his job after fifteen years in the same company (always the same job, always the same tasks and responsibilities, zero willingness to prosper and get a raise). It was not because her husband wasted his time at home sitting in front of the computer or television while the girls were at school, or because he would not share his time with her when she came home from work, or because he simply forgot about the girls when Elena was home. She didn’t even care about the offhanded way he administered his severance pay (after all, they did share one single bank account; when they got married they had thought it romantic), as if a tomorrow of scarcity and shortages was not lurking in the shadows around the corner, waiting for them. It was because of the shared giggles at the kitchen table that now excluded her, the gossiping, the mouth-to-ear whispering on the sofa, the girls’ looks of concern that turned to cackles with any inappropriate joke their father improvised. It was because she was sick and they were not, because she was isolated from their happiness, denied an embrace when she needed it the most. Did she have a shorter fuse than some years back? Of course she did! He did not have to deal with a boss who wanted to fuck her – and, may her daughters forgive her, she was starting to think it was not such a bad idea – and who didn’t even bother to hide it in front of their colleagues. His body and his hormones had not been ravaged by two pregnancies. He had his Sunday game cards with his friends, yes, but never found a moment to leave the kids at home with a babysitter and take her out to dinner. So fucking selfish. 11/12/2021 0 Comments The Thicc, by Christy AdmiraalDear Readers, We were so excited and overwhelmed by the stories we received for our Intimacy chapbook that we had to share a few on The Rail! We're kicking off the series with a delightful story from Christy Admiraal. While editing this piece, I was particularly enamored of its warmth and humor, not to mention how the two characters felt lived in and distinctly human. In Christy's words, this is a story "loosely based around the concept of intimacy, but mostly about kissing" and I'm positive you're going to love it as much as I did Keep an eye on Derailleur Press's social media for upcoming announcements on our chapbook releases, and of course keep an eye on The Rail for more brilliant writing each week. Happy reading! - Derailleur Press Nico would never call himself a baker, though, by definition, that was what he was. Yes, he had a semi-fulfilling day job in marcomm, he ran five mornings every week, and he possessed a borderline encyclopedic knowledge of cult movies, but baking—baking was different. Baking was solace. Whenever he had to work past 8pm, he made a pan of blueberry muffins with lemon zest and browned butter. Whenever things went south with someone he’d seen a glimpse of a future with, he perfected the crust of his key lime cheesecake. And whenever he had to run interference on a petty disagreement between his mother and youngest sister, he returned to his absolute favorite recipe: a chocolate chip and oatmeal cookie with the darkest possible brown sugar, best served with homemade vanilla ice cream on the side. He called the cookie Layton’s Folly, after his own last name and the fact that adding chocolate chips to oatmeal raisin batter had been a complete fuckup on his part. He couldn’t argue with the result, which tasted nothing like a mistake, and he’d been baking and eating or freezing the fruits of his labor ever since. For tonight, he’d baked a batch of lemon bars. Jenny had told him they were her favorite when he asked—not out of pure curiosity, but because Nico knew he wanted to bake her something, and he wanted to be sure she’d actually enjoy it. He liked to make a good impression on a first date, especially one he was excited about. And he was excited. But he was also annoyed. 11/6/2021 3 Comments The Only Way Out, by Taylor ScottI guess I’m going through something.
Don’t you just hate it when I say that? All my emphasis on guess like I’m not a reckless monetary liability from weeks of wasting paychecks on front row seats to viewings of my life burning down-- my own old Hollywood sideshow. I guess it doesn’t matter much, you’re not listening nearly enough to hate what I have to say anyway. You’re stuck like a kid in a sandbox and too big a fool to know that I know better, that I know next to the oranges in a chain grocery store in the desolation of some backwards hick town, another poor girl will pluck your bruised ego from a bushel of disappointing men and you’ll feel electrified once more. In your current state, you find yourself distraught-- that’s the truth. Distraught! Over a girl and her inability to mourn you “properly”. Well, die first—exit my life with some class, leave me with memories worth mourning! Between work and crawling around on my knees for a god that threw me to the wolves, I guess I could spare a moment to mourn you “properly”, but I won’t. I ran three thousand miles away seeking safety and grief is anything but safe. When I fled across state lines, I ran into a daydream—or so I thought. Every day I wake up to find him still waiting for me-- it’s as real as your arrogance. This incidental happiness with this person that waited to see me smile, with this person that I’d drop everything for-- you’re better off calling him “Replacement”-- he could give me a real reason to mourn. Kindness without the strings, manipulation is uncharted territory—he refuses to dim my glow. I’m not putting it all on the line with him, I’m not putting it all on the line for him. There is safety in his presence. I watch his eyes when he sees me-- they are simmering soup on a snow day. While you crawl into a bad mood stew, I forget the way joy fills my lungs, how it feels when another person tends to the garden in my veins. You wouldn’t understand that-- you evicted your dignity lifetimes ago, there is no room for concern in your profile. It’s how I know you’ll never think about mourning me. Don’t you just hate it when I make everything about me? I guess I’m going through something but the mourning process is not it. 10/29/2021 2 Comments Bath Time, by Jo GarwoodLike some great crushing snake filled with the burning heat of the hottest hot water bottle you’ve ever known. Enveloping you so slowly at the start, that you barely notice, like that story about the frog in boiling water. And the heat becomes blackness, sadness, great mounds of soil filling your mouth, but warm, not cold or damp, so perhaps it’s sand or space. You turn on your side like a foetus, like some pale, pulsing pulpa or a great inflated larvae in a too-small cocoon. You’d been reading poetry, quietly, toe in the tap and a flannel on your forehead, ignoring covid 19 successfully for the first time in nine weeks, feeling a great feminist fire in your belly. No bubbles, no razor, not even soap or shampoo for your hair, just hot hot hot water up to your ears, and cuts from new knives on your knuckles. The poetry was flinging the door open for you to stare down the long corridor, back at yourself, and peer into old classrooms and feel that first feeling of Plath and Frida and Maya Angelou. It was reminding you of all the fights and fists, the protests and the tiny wins and the huge great stinking victories which have come before you and then the book felt like a bomb in your wrinkled, puckered mitts. And your anger flushed and bloomed and grew from the small, hard walnut in the pit of your stomach, into your lungs, your heart, into the pulse in your hot hot hot neck. And you vow that throughout and after this time which serves up horror upon horror, you’ll remember: the fights not won, the fights not won, the fights not won. Not yet. Jo Garwood (she/ her) currently lives with her partner in Brixton, London. By day, she works for a large charity giving advice to the public on a range of problems, from debt and housing to legal and consumer problems. She has been writing since childhood and was thrilled to get 1 of 13 places on the BA English with Creative Writing degree at the University of East Anglia after leaving school, way back in 2001! Since then, she has continued to write fiction and poetry and also enjoys lino cutting and printmaking, DIY queer film, LGBTQ activism and collecting penknives.
10/27/2021 0 Comments Change of Scenery, by Kevin CampHe arrived in great haste, remembering to turn sharply off of the paved road where there were no lights, tears streaming down his face. Words had been exchanged once again with his father, and though he didn’t really need the money, a crisp $20 bill had been thrust aggressively at him. The meaning was clear: take the money and leave me the hell alone. He knew instinctively that one doesn’t pick one’s parents, but sometimes that wasn’t consolation enough by itself.
Inside his yellow vinyl backpack was a compendium of gay pornography, magazines mostly, purchased downtown at the so-called “adult bookstore.” He always had to laugh at the word choice employed to disguise its true purpose. There wasn’t a single book on the shelf to be sold, but on the racks was a compendium of pornographic magazines sitting upright on worn wooden bookshelves—three packs in the shrink wrap. Behind them, against one back wall, was a collection of dildos and vibrators encased in thick plastic on hooks, and then more shelves—brand-new tapes stacked up neatly with cardboard sleeves still in the shrink wrap, ready to be sold. |