Circling the Drain (14 page)

Authors: Amanda Davis

BOOK: Circling the Drain

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Tony Giobambera's hands are on his knees. His fingers are long and thin. On his right hand is a silver ring. I focus on it, on the pattern of it, but don't answer. I keep it all to myself, as though the power of words could make things come true. In the distance the fat girl spins and falls, spins and falls. She's a violent scratch of blue in the clear green day. She knows everything that matters, everything there is. I inhale and blow smoke up into the sky where it dissolves and disappears.

Nothing dangerous, I tell him. Nothing to be alarmed about.

There's a gentle breeze and the knife is warm against my leg. In the distance the fat girl falls. I wonder, with everything I am, if this is the moment I've been waiting for.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the support and encouragement of Lois Rosenthal, Laurie Henry, Will Allison, Ben Schrank, Dave Eggers, Adrienne Miller, Irini Spanidou, Peter Spielberg, Ken Foster, Jason Lowi, Elizabeth Gaffney, Sheilah Coleman, my family, The Heekin Foundation, The Blue Mountain Center, The MacDowell Colony, and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference.

Especially warm thanks for their wisdom and insight (and for taking a gamble on me) to Colin Dickerman, Henry Dunow, Jen Carlson, and Rob Weisbach.

& most of all, thanks to J. Lumpy Lethem (worth all the late-night miles),

& Petunia H. Julavits, who renews my faith in everything.

About the Author

A
MANDA
D
AVIS
's
work includes the story collection
Circling the Drain
and the novel
Wonder When You'll Miss Me
. An acclaimed young writer, Ms. Davis died in March 2003.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Praise

“Amanda Davis delivers the stuff of good short stories: passionate writing, empathetic characters, themes of alienation and loss, and beautiful language that keeps stinging long after you read itâ¦simply told, with the sweet, kooky humor of Grace Paley.”

âNew York

“Davis quickly garners respect with a promising set of stories. Stark and simply wrought, her fiction follows a series of women dazed by life's brutalities.”

âSan Francisco Chronicle

“Amanda Davis's first collection is an arresting event. These stories amuse you with their wit, move you with their passion, and startle you with the endless resourcefulness of their imagination.”

âMadison Smartt Bell

“Inside Davis's tightly sketched women's worldâ¦girls, in the face of love, are tragicomically powerless. It's their willingness to be vulnerable that makes them heroines.”

âVillage Voice

“Amanda Davis writes gently, even poetically, about extraordinary brutality. She has a distinctively creepy, noirish sensibility.”

âNew York Times Book Review

“Amanda Davis makes a promising entrance in her fiction debut.”

âVanity Fair

“Original and full of promise.”

âKirkus Reviews

Copyright

Some of these stories have appeared elsewhere in slightly different form: “Prints” and “Chase” in
Story
; “The Very Moment They're About” (as “To Kiss Him”) in
Seventeen
; and “Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons” in
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern
.

CIRCLING THE DRAIN
. Copyright Â© 1999 by Amanda Davis. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Â© Edition JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061853463

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