i'm right here - Softcover

Rauch, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 096594431X ISBN 13: 9780965944311

Publisher: Spout Press, 1998

Synopsis

Poetry. I'M RIGHT HERE is a new collection of experimental short fiction by Minnesota author Tony Rauch. Rauch paints a surreal landscape of lurid sex, secret agents, Scott Baio, ostriches, and professional wrestling—each story building on the last to give a bizarre, off-balance commentary on the isolation, loneliness and chaos of modern urban society.

About this title

About the Author

Tony Rauch was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota and spent his formative years locked in a closet writing obituaries for the local paper. he went off to college to study architecture and general listlessness somewhere in Wisconsin. He currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is working on a sequal to this collection.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

a selection from the story "dinner with you":

". . . I stopped by a burger joint and got a bag of grease--a burger and fries to have for supper when I got home. On the way back, all cold and sweaty and alone and scared and feeling bad and mad and hungry and shaky and tired and sad and weak and frustrated and cursing everything that went by--trees and dogs and other guys with their girlfriends and all the places you hang out so far from me and all the other guys you see and God and the day I was born and just then I hit this tremendous pothole and I heard this shhhhiiiffffft sound like something had rattled loose and fallen off the bike. As I glided down the oil-stained and broken-glass-freckled gutter, I slowed and bent down to investigate each side of my bike to make sure it was all there.

I held the grease-soaked bag in a fist wrapped around the handle bars and noticed after I started up again down the block that the bag was just flapping there in my hand like a sad, flat glove. Its bottom was ripped out under the weight of the soggy grease.

I turned and cursed my way back up the block to the intersection where that pothole had been resting. When I got back there, I found my french fries spilled in the pothole, as if trying to escape from a large salad bowl. The burger was a few feet away, stampeding out of its soggy wrapper. It sat folded over on itself, slouching inside-out, crawling out of the tissue onto the street like an awakening child from a soft blanket.

I laid my bike down against the curb and then joined it, sitting down in frustrated anger and began scooping up the burger and setting it on what was left of the bag. The bun was flat as a paper plate and the burger shredded, like the carcass of a small animal on the side of a hot, lonely, forgotten road.

I sat there on the curb looking down on it all. There wasn't much I could do with it. In my professional estimation, it was simply beyond repair, so I began eating, picking the ground-up meat and strands of bread, indistinguishable from one another, and began lifting them between my fingers, raising the street up to my mouth and chewing, with sand and pebbles crunching and grinding against my teeth, gladly swallowing tar and gravel and gnawing more sand.

I sat at your dinner table, with large oil stains for place mats, and plates of grease and gas spots, and sticks and leaves for tableware. And suddenly I noticed you coming up the block--you were walking with your friend Maureen and that other girl that I don't like as I chewed spitefully.

You were wearing that heartbreakingly tight shirt with the really low-cut neck and all those breathtaking colors screaming by in stripes, a thousand colors cruising along at a thousand miles per hour. And you had on those beautiful faded black jeans that reminded me of the nice roads that would lead me back to all those beaches where everything was warm and pleasant and calm.

You stepped off the sidewalk from across the street and landed on your table. And you were coming right this way, and I was just sitting there before you on the ground--in the sand--eating dirt."

Edition details

• Publisher: Spout Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 096594431X
• ISBN 13: 9780965944311
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 207