elsewhere

Jefferson Navicky

Small, Illogical Bursts of Pleasure: A Review of Stephen Tuttle’s We Should Be Somewhere By Now

The narrator of Stephen Tuttle’s story “At the Gates of the Kingdom” is standing before the button of a doorbell. He’s already pushed it once, but nothing happened: “I pushed the button again and waited again. I repeated this process maybe five or six times. Each time I pushed the button, I felt a small, illogical burst of pleasure. It was pointless, of course, but I liked pushing the button and waiting. The button gave a satisfying resistance and gave me the sense of actively doing something. This is a hard thing to describe, but I often long for a physical response to things I’ve done.”

I came upon this little ars poetical nugget on the third page of the story, but thought about it for the entirety of We Should Be Somewhere By Now (Cornerstone Books 2025). The passage feels applicable to any writer, that illogical burst of pleasure for repeating a pointless act (in fact, I’m feeling it now as I write this review in front of my woodstove on a frigid December day with my cat on my lap). Indeed it’s a hard thing to describe. If you know, you know. And yet, this description of doing the same small thing, like ringing a doorbell or walking, over and over again, feels particularly apt for Tuttle, a writer whose stories are both prosaic and labyrinthine at the same time.

“At the Gates of the Kingdom” is an exemplar of a story. By the time of the above quote on the third page, we’ve made it from an exterior door to standing in front of an interior door. What door? What house? What’s happening? We don’t get any of that information, but we do get a lot of description about each door. And a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic story of self-inflicted disenchantment, “Wakefield.” However, rather than Hawthorne, the story that kept springing to mind was “Before the Law” by Franz Kafka, a very short parable where a character stands in front of a door and never manages to enter. It’s a classic story of volition and impotence. Tuttle’s story, especially in its vaguely unsettling yet hyper-real setting, reminded me of Kafka’s. Kafka’s dialed-down language (at least as read in most translations) also reminded me of Tuttle’s.

But Tuttle has his own rhythms. Aimee Bender, in her blurb, perceptively calls it “intensely visible yet invisible.” Tuttle knows how to get out of the way and let the story do the talking. And yet, he also likes to drill down into a subject. In “The Future King,” we get a page on the reasons why the king would hypothetically time-travel into the future. In “At the Gates of the Kingdom,” we get a page on a doorknob. At times I wished for less doorknob and more walking through doors.

If Tuttle is a sort of maximalist Kafka, he also, like Kafka, knows how to hold a joke. Two stories in this collection, “The Scold” and “Hidden Curriculum,” are incredibly timed satires of two age-old hot-button topics: babies and education. The latter story is a particularly joyous send-up of holier-than-thou parents who judge harshly on such topics as knots, crayons, and frostbite. Both these stories beg to be adapted for the stage. Audiences will roar.

Both those stories also get a lot of juice from their point of view. Tuttle is a master of the royal We. Sometimes the first-person plural is a tightly walled domestic couple, as in the two above stories, and Tuttle uses that royal obfuscation, its closed loop, to impressive results. Other times, as in “The Weather Here,” the first-person plural expands to an undefined, perhaps undefinable, multitude. The “We” resonates out, and it can be hard to tell how many selves reside in the collective.

My favorite story of the collection also inhabits the wide world of We, but in “The Funambulist,” the first-person plural is a close-knit community trying to make sense of the eponymous tight-rope walker who has walked to his death. The We here creates whisper-in-the-ear intimacy, not so much an intimacy of close friends, but the intimacy born of a group stricken by tragedy. The story is a cross between The Walk (the 2015 movie about the Twin Tower tightrope walker Phillipe Petit) and an episode of the dystopian television series Black Mirror. What might at first feel realistic ends up feeling far from it, and this feeling of vertigo leaves a reader wondering how Tuttle performed his high-wire act. The story’s end finds us walking, again, another simple, repetitive act. This is a collection where men walk. They walk out of compulsion, or maybe for their health, or maybe to walk towards some unnameable ailment or urge or ache. In these stories, walkers are searchers:

We find ourselves walking more than ever before. On bright days and when the weather is nice, we wander the streets. We don’t say to one another that we’re trying to see what we will later wish we had seen. We don’t say what it might be we’re looking for, but if we’re being honest, we are looking for something. Because something’s missing.

As for what’s missing, I can’t say. But I can say that Stephen Tuttle is a steady and nimble guide for the journey. His stories serve as guideposts for our walking.

MK Francisco

WATERCOURSE

You could not tell the river. It knitted a cold certain path down the foothills then fanned out and forgot itself in arroyos, seeps and springs. Later it would find itself in ephemeral wet meadows gorging on salmon or drowsy in the tidal flats bordered by dunes. Year-round, boats sailed long stretches of its streams under sycamore canopy causing knife fights or songs or rashes. Each storm swelling its banks might sculpt a new channel to the sea. You could not tell the river. A new flood might carve a new mouth ecstatic and hallucinating. You could not trust it. A lagoon perfumed with mosquitoes, rushes and common yellowthroat might become a dry lake with a willow thicket. When it submerged the city, they rebuilt on higher ground. When it blacked out another city and took more lives, they froze its banks and paved its bottom. You could call it a predictable conduit for run-off. For a long time, no one remembered the river. You could not tell the river.

Cora Schipa

Passenger Seat Migraine

It’s hard to write about pain. I like the words narcissus crumble catastrophic tachycardia febrile murderous, I spell them out letter by letter so I’m not consumed by my left temple glowing hot as sparkling pink beaches, aura like quivering asphalt in the 4am darkness, hands cup my eyes you can’t see me I can’t see you you you, tinnitus like violins in E flat crescendo orchestral metronome, pain a goddess spreading out on a blinding white sheet between my eyes. My heart rolls like Southern heat, reminds me she could kill me in seconds, and I think of a saw gripping my skull, of lifting the top delicate as egg-shell so it makes a light sucking sound, peering inside to drag out the crawling nerves, of my head crushed, the gritty calcium of my cranium unrecognizable in flesh. Someone once described to me how brain feels in your mouth, like scrambled eggs, fragile, savory, bitter hiding in your throat. A delicacy. How strange to think our insides never see light, our teeth the only visible bones. Mine, still ridged from childhood, enamel-stripped and petal-translucent, bloom with pain, pistil stigma style ovary coiling through sinuses, the wiry twist of jaw. I’m scared of the dentist. My body is at once not my business and so utterly stuck to me, mine. Once at the hospital I tapped so hard on the linoleum tiles they gave way, as things eventually do, and let me in. I counted them: One two three, un deux troix, eins zwei drei, What is the language of pain? Once I was as close to God in church on Christmas morning as in the ICU, where the seconds hang, waver, hesitate, prayers throwing themselves against skulls, people strung up and beeping and dripping and desperate, tiny tiny plants struggling through concrete, the nurses smacking gum and scrolling. Stethoscope contusion malignant intravenous sometimes I think I’m the weakest person in the whole world. I do not know if I could take it, for anyone. Teeth rolling in a mouthful of blood, needles tugging at skin, throats cushioned with ice. But they say: What is love if not sacrifice? The bright beautiful imagined people of television all look up at their pixelated lovers and ask the same question: Would you die for me? Would you suffer? Death as a gift, wrapped in shiny ribbon. Perhaps there’s a comfort of being encased here, wholly absorbed in pain, ruled by it; don’t talk to me about emails or clocking in or calling, what matters is the trees, their branches reaching over the highway, roots stretching under the night, swelling into darkness.

Edith-Nicole Cameron

Anachronism

It wasn’t what you think – flies stayed zipped, mouths mostly closed, a sole spaghetti strap escaped its perch, sure, violated its vow, I guess, a single unbound finger restored order, in I suppose a sort of disordered way. It wasn’t what you think – the only penetration an ocean-bottom gaze, the only betrayal mislaunched wishes shy a safe landing, the only turbulence volcanic druthers rising through a rift opened, if we’re being honest here, half-ish on purpose. It wasn’t what you think – the only steam the pavement / jasmine / smog; the only flame the highway; the only fluids exchanged damp dreams dripping of Hollywood. Did you know the orange air in L.A. is Victorian box trees? Not real citrus. It wasn’t what you think – you were there too, thrusting worst-case scenarios from 2,000 miles away. Me, blinded by an assault of headlights and overserved gin. You, cuckold / widower, casualty of a drunk ex’s red pickup. It wasn’t what you think – an electric current supplied, the switch an untripped panic button. It wasn’t what you think but I was thinking, lately, did I ever thank you for staying?

Ryan Griffith

The Weather in Paris

Stillness. Only the sudden blaze of a cigarette, smoke twisting like blue desire to the sky. How to name that blue? The blue of lost fathers, of the suffering eyes of Christ. A boy downstairs speaks in his languid French vowels, vowels inherited from his parents, his mouth alive with sound. I am trying to get as close as I can to it.

My window is like a door opening into a green religion of trees. I enter my thoughts into the book of days, this moment of waiting for the dance to begin, like Degas’ pastel ballerinas caught just behind the curtain, whimical as smoke, like language in the mouth, alive then gone. Sometimes stillness is all we need, good bread, children talking, small baptisms of light.

A woman walks by while reading a book, men with loaves the color of flesh. The day is like an orchestra warming up. Later I go beneath the city, board the Metro, tunnels gusting us to Odeon, Chateau Rouge, Etienne Marcel. Doors sigh with the exodus of riders. The city above is like stumbling into the cinema after a dark lobby. I pass a carnival, the sad glamour of a carousel, horses impaled on their golden rods. In the shops I am looking for an antique key I can’t find, a key with verdigris teeth, a patina the color of time. In America my father has died and I am searching for an ancient key that unlocks nothing.

Jeanine Walker

The Talmud States, “One day in this life is better than an eternity in the next.”

You want to be an angel. So you find a way to die and then there you go, up to where all of the other angels flutter around and you celebrate, yes, yes, I am finally here. There is something moral in it for you. Moral, and, you think, redeemable, respectable, something that makes your death more worth living than your life. You’d like to tell people who’d listen (and everyone who knew they could would listen) what you see up there, but part of being an angel means not speaking to the living. Some days, angel, your mouth opens just the way it used to when you’d talk to those you loved, but no words come out. Nothing at all comes out. He in charge of the angels tells you it is possible, with work, to rise in angel rank, to become even better at being dead. If you do, eventually, your mouth might make a sound the living can hear: the crack of a bird’s caw, or wind thumping against an abandoned house.

Ralph Culver

That Island

That island. See? Yes, the one floating in midair like a forested cloud, or a pesto-slathered baguette held aloft by marionette strings. As I watch the sun-dusted display of wild horses tumbling from the island into space, falling, spiraling, their legs hysterically churning against nothingness, I conclude, as I have before on any number of occasions, that there is no one left in Hollywood with a new idea in their head. Except now I’m hungry. When’s dinner? I can’t imagine another meal without you. My darling, I beg you, descend through the air into my waiting arms. I’ll start cooking.

Centa Therese Uhalde

You are Not Lost

You are here. Gently, slide your hands under the back of her head. Make them a cradle for the skull. Stop repeating the myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Feel the draw of breath. Anchor your feet. Follow where the head wants to roll. Build a humble, flawed life. From midline, rock on your sitz bones. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up. Track the breath as your fingertips find the soft notch of the occiput. Nothing more fabulous than someone who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self. Let the weight of the head fall back. Relish the feeling of building a hut in the middle of the suffocating dust. Cherish this. ♦