Pocketknife - Part One
My father died eight months ago at age eighty-eight. Now he is back, standing not more than twenty yards away.
Pocketknife was my first piece of short fiction after I turned my attention to writing full-time. It occupied my attention through the fall of 2022, and started making the rounds of literary journals in January, 2023. My editor, Erik Klass, liked the piece a great deal--still his favorite of mine, I think--and through his service, SubmitItnow.com, he included The New Yorker and The Atlantic on the submission list.
It has yet to be accepted for publication anywhere. Part of the reason, is that originally it was about 15,ooo words--really long for short fiction these days. Most journals are looking for stories under 5,000. I retooled it a year ago to get it under 10,000 words and submitted it to a few places on my own. No luck. I'll try again, but the right answer for the story might be to go longer, not shorter. Erik had suggested at the beginning that it could be a novella. I will post it here in several parts.
I'm still in love with the concept, imagining seeing my father again, some time after his death, as his active, younger self, married and parent now to other children.