Exchange by Peter Krumbach
Image by PN art intern Danielle White, @yourdanidoodles.
Associate shorts editor Dacia Price on today’s bonus flash: In 305 words, Peter Krumbach manages to capture the absurdity that is the mundane everyday: an attempt toward human connection that both is and isn’t. Facts ricochet off grief as stories interrupt other stories. This micro-short masterfully captures multitudes in a single moment of “exchange.”
Exchange
Two raccoons—one bigger, one smaller. Every night, at the curb. They don’t run away when I walk by. Just stand up on their hind legs and approach me, the front paws—eerie, dexterous—held close to their chests. The masked miens make me nervous. They are intelligent, able to remember the solution to tasks for at least three years, their cunning surpassing that of the fox. This morning, when I describe all this to my Swedish neighbor Gorm, he says his mother’s 90-year-old one-armed fiancé has just suddenly died in a sauna. I offer my condolences. We stand there, beside Gorm’s garage, and I wonder whether he’s even listening when I tell him that raccoons are able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries and have no problem repeating the action when the locks are rearranged or turned upside down. Gorm says his mother had him when she was 15. She’s struggled with severe mental issues all her life, been institutionalized on several occasions. I say that the two animals I described earlier appear to be a mother and her kit. “When I was 16,” Gorm says, “I began working on oil tankers in the North Sea. It was a way to remove myself from the world.” We stand in silence for a while, watching Gorm’s wife extracting a large green kayak from their Subaru hatchback. Gorm had met her in Vietnam. Their two children—a pianist and a violinist—are prodigies. I wave at the wife and tell Gorm that in neuroscientific research, raccoons have been found to be comparable to primates in density of neurons in the cerebral cortex. Gorm steadies himself and says, “I once saw Mother washing the trees in our garden with a pail of water and a sponge.” “What kind of trees?” I ask. “Mostly plums,” he says.
Peter Krumbach’s new collection Degrees of Romance, the winner of the 2022 Antivenom Poetry Award, will be published by Elixir Press in 2023. His most recent work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, The Manhattan Review, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, and X-R-A-Y.
