Meeks
Julia Holmes
Language: English
Pages: 189
ISBN: 1931520658
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
No woman will have Ben without a proper bachelor’s suit . . . and the tailor refuses to make him one. Back from war with a nameless enemy, Ben finds that his mother is dead and his family home has been reassigned by the state. As if that isn’t enough, he must now find a wife, or he’ll be made a civil servant and given a permanent spot in one of the city’s oppressive factories.
Meanwhile, Meeks, a foreigner who lives in the park and imagines he’s a member of the police, is hunted by the overzealous Brothers of Mercy. Meeks’ survival depends on his peculiar friendship with a police captain—but will that be enough to prevent his execution at the annual Independence Day celebration?
A dark satire rendered with the slapstick humor of a Buster Keaton film, Julia Holmes’ debut marries the existentialism of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground to the strange charm of a Haruki Murakami novel. Meeks portrays a world at once hilarious and disquieting, in which frustrated revolutionaries and hopeful youths suffer alongside the lost and the condemned, just for a chance at the permanent bliss of marriage and a slice of sugar-frosted Independence Day cake.
Julia Holmes was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and grew up in the Middle East, Texas, and New York, where she is currently an assistant editor at Rolling Stone. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction.
Morte d'Urban (New York Review Books Classics)
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The Little Demon (Penguin Classics)
Accident,” said the hateful bachelor and smiled. Ben pressed his cheek against the muddy moss of the ground to cool his head, a place that was becoming unbearable. He could see the house and orchard behind it. The fog rolled forward again, devouring the muddy shoes of the hunters. When Ben came to again, he was wrapped in a bedsheet; men were hustling him back to the house. He had been dreaming about the sound of the bell of the knife grinder's cart in the rain, when the knife grinder parked.
Were old friends suddenly in the presence of an awkward and unfortunate outsider. This is the tailor, said Bedge—he had ignored the tailor's greeting. He'll fit you for your suit—your costume. The tailor approached me, holding his measuring tape out like a net, as if I were some simple creature who could be crept up on and captured. I backed away and glanced at Bedge. I was wary of the tailor and do not, as a rule, enjoy or find easy to tolerate the touch of strangers’ hands upon my body, even.
They've already got us, right? That it couldn't get any worse?" The heavens watcher was lying in the grass, listening; he looked up at the hammerer. “I tend to agree with you, but, really, it could get worse. God knows what happens in the prison, and there's that,” he said, pointing to the coiled rope high among the branches. Ben turned his back on them and sat back on the root. He watched the newly minted mothers and fathers, the newly minted husbands and wives, folding their blankets neatly.
Him. A man cleared his throat noisily beside me. Bedge had brought over another actor and ordered him to stand beside me; we were standing shoulder to shoulder at the base of the platform steps. Trade jackets, whispered the other actor. Pardon me? Let's trade costumes—you take mine, and I'll take yours. No way. Never, I said, continuing to look straight ahead, and I shook my head in disbelief. Even a novice to the stage knows better than to break this most basic rule. But I couldn't resist.
Of the park, the people for whom things were under way. Their ships had sailed, and they smiled in the ship's breeze of an amiable open sea, and they smiled at the sights and sounds beyond the ship's rail, and they were people who were launched and it was a pleasure to watch them inhabit their pleasures without embarrassment. Young bachelors were leaning on their elbows along the green, sunny slopes, the young shadows of the trees overlapping in the grass, mild yellow nectars burning on their.