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Selected by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry Editor

Stephanie Barbé Hammer: Excerpts from Rescue Plan

By Stephanie Barbé Hammer on February 17, 2021 inLiterature

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1. Gomer Faithcutt liked swimming. The feeling of weightlessness. The power to do things he could never do on the ground: somersaults — back and front — handstands, and dives from the highest board. Then, he had started learning to save people from drowning a year ago, last spring. He’d completed the class work for Junior Lifeguard and even taken the written test.

Then he got brain cancer.

2. All winter, the water polo team from the high school up at Amherst had been using the pool for practice, and these boys were tall and powerful, and their legs were muscled to the point of ropiness. And grownup guys came too – policemen and firefighters from Narrow Interior. They used to pool for strength training, and for relaxation. The way those bodies moved through space with ease and knowledge. He wanted to be close to bodies like that.

Gomer knew what coming out was. He had taken the sex-ed classes, and there were gay people in his town, but they tended to come for weekends and the summer, because they had jobs in the city. They were rich gay people, in other words, and he went to public school, and the local people were different.

3. Sometimes, when things got serious, Gomer called his father by his first name. Like a lot of people in this town, they both had Bible names, although Gideon wasn’t religious, and Gomer’s mother, Ming Ming was a Confucian atheist like most PRC nationals. After the divorce, Gideon made Gomer go to the church near the college. He had heard the coffee ladies muttering about an acquaintance’s son who lived in the big city with his – the ladies muttered – BOYFRIEND.

Excerpts from RESCUE PLAN by Stephanie Barbé Hammer, Bamboo Dart Press, 2021. Click image to purchase.

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About the author

Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Stephanie Barbé Hammer is a 6-time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction and poetry with work published in The Bellevue Literary Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Pearl, the James Franco Review, Isthmus, Cafe Irreal, and the Gold Man Review. She is the author of the prose poem chapbook SEX WITH BUILDINGS (dancing girl press), the full-length collection HOW FORMAL? (Spout Hill Press), the fabulist novel THE PUPPET TURNERS OF NARROW INTERIOR (Urban Farmhouse Press). Her new novelette RESCUE PLAN gives readers another peek into the haunted history depicted in PUPPET TURNERS, and she is currently seeking a publisher for her second novel in the Narrow Interior series. Originally from Manhattan, Stephanie lived in SoCal for 30 years and now currently resides in rural Washington State. She is managing editor of SHARK REEF Literary Magazine and sits on the advisory board of WRITERS BLOC Los Angeles. She teaches creative writing at Hugo House Seattle, and the Inlandia Institute, Riverside. Stephanie is also a highly regarded comparatist with 3 scholarly books on the 18th Century and more than 20 published articles on subjects ranging from the poetry of Gertrude Kolmar to the function of satire in South Park.

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