About

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, forthcoming from Keyhole Press in October 2010. His fiction appears in literary magazines such as Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. He is also the editor of The Collagist. For more information, click here.

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How They Were Found
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Tuesday
09Feb2010

they focus their attention on the vibrating and buzzing

She thinks probably he is coming on to her or is going to come on to her if their conversation continues, so she decides not to get into the whole chimp-not-monkey conversation someone should have gotten into with him in grade school or earlier. Lodi waits for Diana to meet her at the soda machine before she goes on. Diana is walking slowly, reading something in a magazine, her head down. She is tall and thin, and her hair reaches down her back almost to her waist in a style Lodi likes to refer to as "Christian-splinter-group-chic." They are in the break room, which is overwhelmingly beige and too small for the number of people who work at the bank. The male coworker has left, slunk off, perhaps headed to the bathroom. Someone is asleep on an old brown leather couch in the corner, his nose lightly whistling, but otherwise, the tables are empty. The comfortable chairs are empty. The room is mostly empty. Just Lodi, and Diana, who is microwaving something — soup maybe — the whistler, and the man whose name Lodi has forgotten. He is wearing khaki pants and running shoes, a look Lodi despises. By the transitive process, Lodi despises the man. He has glasses, but otherwise his face is indistinct and practically invisible.

--From "Happy Rock" by Matthew Simmons, published today in FANZINE

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