The Square Table

Short Story

By Corey Mesler

A man whose communication falls just short of sense--says whirl for world, lie for life, etc.--meets her in the Laundromat, or an all-night grocery, meets her again a few days later at the flea market, sees her at a stoplight late one night, looking into the other cars, too.

She's the woman looking for serious commitment, in search of the long term, finding only short stories, a world of short stories, a world of missed connections.

She's the kind of middlebrow with pretensions toward higher ideas, who writes "aw, come on" in the margins of her Norton Anthology. She writes him a letter.

He stands in the bright sunshine on his sidewalk holding the unopened envelope in his hand. He looks at it so hard.

Corey Mesler is the owner of Burke’s Book Store, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals including Yellow Silk, Pindeldyboz, Green Egg, Black Dirt, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Poet Lore and others. A short story of his has been chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel, published by Algonquin Books. He also claims to have written, "All Along the Watchtower." Talk, his first novel, appeared in 2002. And a chapbook of poems, Chin-Chin in Eden, came out in 2003. Most importantly, he is Toby and Chloe’s dad and Cheryl’s husband.