Fiction Friday: The Glimpse by Jonathan Roy

Fiction Friday featured new author: Jonathan Roy

Yours Truly noticed Roy's writing in social media and invited him to make a submission for both Fiction Friday and the Fiction Friday writing contest (with the winners scheduled to be announced in November). As an editor, I'm happy to say that Roy's prose is a great start--and that he is prolific, and other manuscripts are also under consideration here.

Yes, this is not exactly crime fiction, but hey, I dug the prose, Roy is based in Warsaw, and I'm the editor so there you go.

With regard to his background, the blurb below pretty much sums it up. Otherwise, enjoy and merry weekend reading.

Jonathan Roy is a New Yorker living in Warsaw who has been dabbling with writing since he could hold a pen—with his left hand. After many an awkward dinner in the Sahara he penned a novel (as yet unpublished) and has spat out the odd short story here and there. Beyond the scribbling he is an architect and designer and painter. He also  owned and designed the Warsaw restaurant and local favorite Koko & Roy before the pandemic forced its closure. He's thinking about a Warsaw spy story...

***

The Glimpse

by Jonathan Roy

I can still remember it. Something silly and small, that my father would do.

We’d go to the shop, with the sweets, the one shop, and he would add his cigarettes onto the candy purchase, like a tax, but never something he made me feel bad about. He was paying, after all.

I knew walking there had its challenges for him. What with the stares and sometimes yells. I knew he was going only for me. So my father, once he had his packet of cigarettes, he would smack the unopened packet into his palm, over and over again before tearing the wrap.

I was quite used to this. But if there happened to be someone close, or a passerby, or many, the sound would startle them. Startled like gunshots. But it was just my father, now smiling and lighting the cigarette. No bombs exploding. Just me and him, looking about and sometimes snickering at everyone, to ourselves. It was his small victory, or maybe a comeuppance, upon the old ladies judging him on the High Street or the other folks, the sheep, the others. He called them sheep after the war. After the war he called most everyone sheep. Or maybe I heard it that way.

But people, generally, they didn’t get his smacking of the cigarettes. They thought him foreign for it.

I remember his palm, the one that received the butt of the packet strikes—(“They are better when rendered dense,” he once explained.”)—and it had this small strawberry there on the gypsy’s life line, a small blotch of broken capillaries that made a kind of rose. I knew it the work of many years.

“How are the candies?” he asked and patted my head.

They were always yummy. I didn’t have to tell him. And I knew his question was rhetorical. Once I thought to ask him if his cigarettes were yummy. I didn’t. Didn’t need to. They seemed so, always, to him.

That one day, walking from the corner sweets’ shop, so not so long ago, with me

holding his hand, towards home.

The car that barreled through the crosswalk and almost hit us. I saw the car, saw the instant, something terrible.

I shook there shocked on what I now call a zebra. He held me and his face all shadowed at this noon time.

He looked down and I could see a smile and he said,

“It’s all ok, you will be ok. Everything’s fine…

"Now you’ve glimpsed it.”

 

["The Glimpse" by Jonathan Roy. All rights reserved by Jonathan Roy with regard to publication or republication in any other medium other than The Corners magazine and on-line magazine derivatives of The Corners. With the appearance of The Glimpse on this publication (www.thecorners.pl) publication/republication rights approved by Jonathan Roy for The Corners magazine/Thecorners.pl/The Corners on Patreon.]

[Those interested in making a fiction submission to The Corners, please send manuscript not longer than 40 pages, double-spaced in Times New Roman 11 font IN A WORD DOCUMENT to thecornersmag@gmail.com or to query@cddi.pl. Content should be focused on Central and Eastern Europe. May be literary, but detective, spy, thriller is preferred. Please note the purpose in the title. A submission does not oblige The Corners to publish or pay for said work. ]