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    Once into the Night
    Once into the Night
    Once into the Night
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Once into the Night

    By Aurelie Sheehan and Laird Hunt

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Winner of FC2’s Catherine L. Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize

    Stories that explore the potent and captivating boundaries between the real and the imaginary
     
    Aurelie Sheehan’s Once into the Night is a collection of 57 brief stories—a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs. What is the difference between fiction and a lie? These stories dwell in a netherworld between memory and the imagination, exploring the nature of truthtelling.

    Here the inner life is granted pride of place with authenticity found in misremembered childhood notebooks, invisible tattoos, and the love life of icemen. Radical in its conception of story, this collection blurs the line between fiction, poetry, and essay, reconceiving contemporary autofiction in its own witty, poignant vernacular. The stories intersect  with and deviate from a “provable” life—a twin distinction that becomes  the source of their power.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateFeb 19, 2019
    ISBN9781573668811
    Once into the Night

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      Book preview

      Once into the Night - Aurelie Sheehan

      collide.

      ORIGIN

      I was born on a bench in a park in a small country. Everyone knew each other back then, in that place. I was born in the swift of night, however, and to be honest they weren’t completely sure I’d been born on the bench—but it was on the bench I was found by them, the warm people of that small country.

      WOLF IN THE BASEMENT

      When I was young, we kept a wolf in the basement. It was a compromise, where one of my parents wanted no wolf and the other wanted the wolf in the living room, and so together they came up with this solution. The wolf lived six steps down from the rest of us, and when we let him out it was from the very back door, the one that faced the forest.

      At first I did not like the wolf. I was a cat person. And we already had a cat—a longhaired, skinny thing, at times willing to let you touch her. When I did pet Minerva, she gave me a look like, this is niceish, probably more so for you than me. I twirled my fingers under her creamy chin, ran them down her gray back. So would the wolf eat my cat? If the door unlatched and what was upstairs went downstairs or vice versa?

      We found the wolf one afternoon on the grounds of an old mansion where we’d gone for a book sale, proceeds of which would go to my mother’s alma mater. We went to this event every year, filling boxes with volumes that cost dimes or quarters. Neither of my parents was profligate, and so the outing always had a feeling of splendor. In the capacious blank rooms, winding lines of books—whole paragraphs of

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