Interior with Storm System by Emily Geminder
Associate fiction editor Krys Malcolm Belc on today's bonus story: In this tablespoon-sized wonder, Emily Geminder cracks open a mysterious, haunting person to find a whirlwind of devastation and its eerie remnants inside. Charged, poetic, and hypnotic, this short piece strikes me a new way each time I look at it and leaves me with more to imagine.
Interior with Storm System
Open it: black hole at the center of the chest. Closet of flesh, blood. Inside you: storm windows, yellow foam, exit sign with blown fuse. Your sister, the prophet, had a sign like that. Long ago and nailed above a window. Its meaning: electric. Its promise: out and through. She wrote: The things in me, you’ll never know. She didn’t say: rooms within rooms, labyrinth of voices, dissolve of brittle white moons. You’d never know. You: dumb, bereft of tongue. TV stuck on mute. Inside you: static and noise. Storm system moving through the tri-state area. Travelers, be warned. You: boarded-up room with only one door. Hurricane, foaming waves, exit wound. You: your one and only voice dropped like a penny at sea. You.
Emily Geminder’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House Open Bar, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and her work was noted in Best American Essays 2016. She is currently a doctoral fellow in fiction at the University of Southern California.
