This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Spring by Megan Weiler (JackLeg Press 2022).
I: Summer 1996
9
(excerpt)
Silvana insisted that I come visit them again this evening.
After we’ve been talking for a while, she suddenly gets up and disappears into the back room. She never brings out refreshments right away. She waits for a certain amount of time, acting as if she had no intention of offering anything. It’s only after one has given up hope that she goes to fetch wine and water and a plate of irregularly cut strips of yellow cake. The cake is fresh and fragrant, still warm from the oven. I wonder if this way of presenting it, in haphazardly hacked pieces like leftovers, is a form of modesty, a way of saying, “Here is my cake—it’s nothing special.”
As always, I decline the wine, then agree to have just a drop in my water, “for color.” They smile their approval. I do everything to distinguish myself from the other foreigners, who are known to “drink a little.” Silvana dilutes hers as well, sipping with the concentration of a child tasting wine for the first time.
She must have baked the cake specially for me. I take a second piece and praise it extravagantly. It really is light and delicious.
Costanzo refuses it: “I don’t eat sweets.” He lights up a cigarette instead, with a defiant air.
Megan Weiler was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Konstanz, Germany. She returned to America after high school and studied English literature at Bryn Mawr College and Yale. She has held many different jobs while writing, from serving beer to the yodeling club in Altnau, Switzerland, to helping foreign nationals in Philadelphia with immigration procedures and applications for political asylum. Her first novel, The Night Bell, was published in 2001 by Picador UK. Her stories and excerpts have appeared in Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Common Knowledge. She lives with her husband in Nashville.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
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