Indiana Review Online 2018: An Undergraduate Project
Birth, Blood, Breed
To read the introduction to the issue and view the masthead, click here.
Posts Tagged: Sean Cunnigham
IR ONLINE: Birth, Blood, Breed
IR Online is an international undergraduate literary journal produced by the Literary Editing and Publishing class at Indiana University, Bloomington. Issue 3 was planned and compiled by Emily Corwin’s class in Spring, 2018.
IR ONLINE FICTION: “Names” by Sean Cunnigham
Many of my primary school teachers called me, in verbatim, a wily, crooked starship. I didn’t know what they meant then, nor do I understand now. My parents used to call me a contradictory errand-boy when I was good, but a faux-silver pot of indefinable volume when I was bad. These were sentiments echoed by my grandparents, though they rarely used the second one themselves, they preferred to say that I was crocheted by a Russian wet nurse on a warm Tuesday in April of the year 1821 – of all the things, this was the one that used to get to me.
The night my father died, the day I turned seventeen, he called me irrefutable in all things but the truth and I wasn’t sure which kind of tears to cry, so I didn’t.
I met my wife when I was eighteen, though we didn’t marry, nor did we even date, until many years later. But on the very night we met, she understood me as though we had once been the same person. She called me too unsteady to resemble lightning and she smiled, as did I.
