![]() ![]() “Sure,” he said, and he moved to the end of the aisle, where the records beginning with X, Y, and Z were displayed in one meager row: Neil Young’s frown, over and over again, and a picture of a zebra standing in a posh bedroom. #Various artist the girl who sees smell full#It was the man from the bank, polite to a fault, always introducing himself by his full name and then saying, “Do you have a moment to talk Mr. And calling her up in his imagination seemed to make his phone ring, although of course, the caller wasn’t her. He thought of her slightly wild stare-the stare from the picture-and considered what it would be like to have those eyes on him, scanning his body and looking for flaws. He had not known what to say, so he hadn’t replied, and he wondered if this was the new pattern they were settling in before the whole thing developed rigor mortis. People still wearing shorts, ordering iced coffees, it was like the good weather would never end, and the week before she had sent him a text asking if he could buy her a new winter coat. That was the last thing he had messaged her, in a moment of weakness, and there had been no reply. Was she thinking about him? Most likely no, but she probably wasn’t thinking about any other man either, or if she was, it was a slew of men, their faces kaleidoscoping into a pleasant haze. The dogs would run on trails, up ahead of her and then back, circling her shuffling body and then spinning out again. Although she didn’t describe it to him-he longed for her to describe it in the same mechanical style she had described her list of sexual desires-he imagined it as a complete picture, down to the level of the ice hanging from the eaves of her cabin, the water collecting around her boots left by the heavy door. ![]() The last week of September and there was snow in Sitka, and not just a dusting. Possibly he was trying hard to become an unlikeable person, to don that invulnerable armor. It was a miracle, in a way, and he had used it to tell her she had beautiful breasts, the mouth of a porn actress. Then he’d send a burst of words to her across thousands and thousands of miles. He had stood in the same indie record store he stood in today, waiting for his phone to vibrate in his palm, occasionally flipping through the musty vinyl, taking in the somber faces of rock stars. In July he had made a promise to stop, and relented, and then rededicated himself to abstinence for a whole week before sending her a flurry of ridiculous messages. And yet he had floated through the entire summer with the buoyancy he remembered from long ago, when he was fifteen and sixteen and the opposite sex was as new to him as the sudden strength found in his own body. Spring had not been a time of renewal: divorce papers in April and then increasingly bad news about the house throughout May. But then she shared it with him, along with a text that explained what she wanted to do to him, a couple of sentences as systematic as a grocery list, a set of instructions. One of her hands blurred, as if she were bringing it to her face to mask herself. In the photograph her face was hard to see, but she looked seriously annoyed with the person taking the picture. In the foreground stood four dogs, all huskies, all from the same litter but one charging toward the camera, the one with the single blue eye and torn ear: the one she said she said she loved best. He knew what she looked like because there she was, eureka, in the background of the single picture she had sent him. She was up there in her one room cabin, playing with her dogs and occasionally texting him dirty, misspelled sentences. September and he was still talking to the girl in Sitka. This is a story that shouldn’t work but does and that’s my favorite kind of story. When I love a story I’m always holding my breath by the last page, hoping the author manages to stick the landing and that happened beautifully here. That’s three separate things that should send this story to a screeching halt in the gutter, and yet I was perpetually drawn forward by the character and by the writing. Here we have a character who’s fundamentally unlikable, who spends the whole story wandering around, and who’s essentially alone for the whole story. Intrigued even more as a writer, by the rules the author was willing I was drawn in on the reader level by “The Alaska Girl,” but I was Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers and judge for the award had this to say about the story: David Crouse’s “The Alaska Girl” was the winner of the 4th annual Hamlin Garland Award in 2018. ![]()
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