Sunday Short: 'The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine' by Melissa Bank

I asked him to tell me the truth about drinking, and he did.    He'd been drinking all along. He told me all the times he could remember. I went back over each one. Then I asked about other times when I'd sensed something was wrong, and went back over the years to the first time--when I'd gone over his house to tell him that Jamie and I had broken up.    This was how I'd felt finding out about my father; it was like getting the subtitles after the movie.    Archie tried to reassure me. He told me that he was not drinking now, and he swore to me that he wouldn't again. He took Antabuse and kept the poker chip in his pocket. But these had failed him before--or he'd failed them. He would drink again, I knew that. It was part of who he was.

I finished Melissa Bank's novel (collection?) 'The Girls' Guide to Hunting & Fishing' this morning, and this was really one of the stand-out story's in it, so I was glad to find it on Zoetrope to be able to link to it. It's a moving portrayal of death and romance, familial love and desperate love and love running out. Bank's writing style is simultaneously distant and intimate, giving you the sort of dull ache that only pretty special writing can. It's lovely, and awful, and a pretty wonderful novelette.

You can read 'The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine' by Melissa Bank over at Zoetrope.