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One Story, Issue number 218: Queen Elizabeth
Excerpt
Many years later, knots of grief cinched intractably within her, Ruth still urged her memory back to their first evening together: drinks at a posh restaurant on the shores of Lake Erie, how Gus offered to pay long before the bartender even noticed them, how he spoke so earnestly of dovetail joints. He wore a flannel shirt and carpenter’s jeans with fabric gone thin at the knees. He was wiry as a cornstalk and always would be. That night he spoke of how he wanted to make desks. “Desks!” he said, smiling as if he knew how absurd it sounded. For now he had his union card and worked what jobs came his way.
Ruth was working on her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Case Western, studying stochastics. She spoke at length about her research, which involved probability theory, random variables, and chaotic systems. Gus listened with genuine interest, and when she finally paused to say, “Does that make sense?” he admitted that he wasn’t a graduate student, wasn’t a student at all, had in fact never been to a college campus. “I doubt I can even spell stochastic,” he said, “but I love listening to you talk about it.”
Many years later, knots of grief cinched intractably within her, Ruth still urged her memory back to their first evening together: drinks at a posh restaurant on the shores of Lake Erie, how Gus offered to pay long before the bartender even noticed them, how he spoke so earnestly of dovetail joints. He wore a flannel shirt and carpenter’s jeans with fabric gone thin at the knees. He was wiry as a cornstalk and always would be. That night he spoke of how he wanted to make desks. “Desks!” he said, smiling as if he knew how absurd it sounded. For now he had his union card and worked what jobs came his way.
Ruth was working on her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Case Western, studying stochastics. She spoke at length about her research, which involved probability theory, random variables, and chaotic systems. Gus listened with genuine interest, and when she finally paused to say, “Does that make sense?” he admitted that he wasn’t a graduate student, wasn’t a student at all, had in fact never been to a college campus. “I doubt I can even spell stochastic,” he said, “but I love listening to you talk about it.”
27 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2016
19 people want to read
About the author
Brad Felver
3 books51 followersBrad Felver is a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher of writing. He is the author of a story collection, The Dogs of Detroit, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, was a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award, and was named one of Library Journal's Best Books of the Year. His other honors include the O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, the Zone 3 Fiction Prize, and a Bread Loaf fellowship. His fiction and essays have appeared widely in magazines such as One Story, Colorado Review, Midwestern Gothic, Hunger Mountain, and New England Review. He lives in northern Ohio with his wife and two sons.
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