Still Life with Plumsis a vibrant collection of short stories that weaves together the outwardly distant lives of several strangers. With heaping doses of dark humor and magical realism, these ten stories enliven a cast of characters carefully speckled throughout the southern portion of the United States. From West Virginians, to Texans and Latinos,Still Life with Plumscircles the paths of a Black-Irish West Virginian, a wise-cracking dog groomer, an emasculated husband, a Guatemalan widow, a Japanese-Latin-American poster child from WWII, and a meticulous predator. Marie Manilla’s accessible prose is deceptively layered, as she births and wrestles this quirky ensemble that unflinchingly probes the human psyche, while affirming a concrete connection to a shared place and identity.
West Virginia nativeMarie Manillais a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared inThe Chicago Tribune,Prairie Schooner,Mississippi Review,Calyx Journal,Kestrel,Portland Review,GSU Review, and other journals. She is the author of the upcoming novelShrapnel, a Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel winner.
Hand. Me. Down.
Holy Thursday, 1965, I squatted over the heater vent in the kitchen picking knee scabs when my father’s voice boomed from down the hall: “You kids get in the car!” His reverberating diktat roused a pummeling of footsteps up from the dank cement basement where the KKK tortured crickets or mice or my younger brother, Duff. The KKK was an apt acronym for my three older brothers, terrorists all, Kevin, Kieran, and Killian, ages twelve through fourteen. At the top of the stairs, the KKK banged out the back door and skittered and slipped up the muddy hill, their great escape unfoiled since my parents had lost control over them long before. The storm door squealed shut behind them in the Aprl³e
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