Let’s start with an opening paragraph:
“Sharks are older than the North Star and gingko trees are the last of their kind and Shasta Lee was the first waitress at Diamond Jim’s Steakhouse to carry three forty-eight-ounce porterhouses, tray perched atop her fingertips. […] Now here she was, thirty-four with a trick knee, and in a tough spot at Diamond Jim’s — Young Mike trying to marry her, and her not wanting to piss off Young Mike when up until last week she’d had a good thing going with his sister, even if it was, so to speak, off the books.”
Welcome to Kate Tooley’s “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama”* (7,300 words) in The Kenyon Review’s latest, where we start with ageless monsters of the deep, immortal trees, and the full sweep of the cosmos, and then zoom in pretty damn quick on a current day love triangle set to explode at an Alabama chophouse.
* Note that you’ll need to register with The Kenyon Review to get access to up to five of their published pieces a month for free (all you need is an email address to do it - such a deal :), or support them and their writers by subscribing.
Shasta Lee is our heroine. She’s the last in her family line (“after cancer and car wrecks and the slow creep of addiction had taken their cut”) and she’s fallen hard for Leora, a divorced single-mom and the granddaughter of Little River’s Pastor’s wife. But Leora’s brother (the aforementioned Young Mike) is hell-bound to get hitched to Shasta Lee.
We’re only two pages into the story when, having recently been cut loose by Leora, Shasta Lee acts rashly under the grandmother’s prodding about her grandson’s prospects for marriage, and blurts out this proposal:
“You tell Young Mike that if he can do my trick with the porterhouses, fixings and all, on the first try, with no spills, then I promise I’ll marry him.”
…which tees up a climax we’re immediately speeding towards.
Two short paragraphs after the proposal, Tooley does some mythological name dropping: of Odysseus’ wife Penelope (she of the loom and the testing of suitors to stall for time during her long-missing-in-action husband’s absence.) But more importantly, of Atalanta; the fleet-of-foot huntress who agrees to her father’s demand that she marry, on the condition that her suitors beat her in a race, or suffer death in losing.
In linking Shasta Lee to these immortals, Tooley raises the stakes of her story from soap-operatic to mythic. Then she delivers. And Kenyon Review took note.
Which begs the question: Are you going-big-or-going-home enough, writer, with your short stories?
There are no small emotions in “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama.” There is lust and longing. There is fear and loathing. There are long-held grudges and matrilineal machinations. And while fever pitched, all of it is fun and often very funny. Most of the paragraphs throughout the telling crackle and fizz with heady ideas and playful wordsmithing:
“[Shasta Lee] used to drive semis on I-40, but what she wanted was to roll around the body of the country, not pass through it, and highways are called arteries for a reason.”
…or…
“Shasta Lee pulled her shoulders back, spine straight, tits out like her mother taught her, glassware stilled and steady now.”
…or…
“wanting anything for more than a moment, more than a day, was the surest road to pain.”
…or…
“She’d quit Wild Turkey because ever since that night, it always tasted like the wrong mouth.”
The hits really do keep coming.
We writers spend a lot of time thinking about plot and character development and pacing and voice—all the big, structural elements that will make the whole of our Frankenstein’s-monsters-that-we-call-stories lumber forward. But spending time in Tooley’s work is a great reminder of the kind of line-by-line joy one can create. A joy that accretes as you read, the way a snowball rolled on the front lawn is, soon enough, the solid base of a serviceable snowman.
And don’t get me wrong, all the big structural elements are attended to completely here. While the plot covers a handful of days, the narrative dips in and out of that timeline, bobbing and weaving as it tracks Shasta Lee and Leora’s passion along with the comings and goings of a host of (yikes, almost used the word delightful) Frank-Capraesque side characters that populate Little River.
When the climax comes and Young Mike is compelled to hoist his porterhouse-laden service tray and walk-the-walk, Tooley raises the stakes at the very moment that the actual steaks are being raised. And the payoff is as big as it needs to be considering the grandeur of the set-up; situationally, emotionally, in every which way.
And at the end we come back to the story’s title…
What, exactly, are the “golden apples” of Little River? We need to go back to Atalanta for that: during her foot race with Hippomenes (her soon-to-be husband, aka “Young Mike”), Atalanta’s suitor was equipped by the gods with three golden apples he used to distract her enough to win the race and so her hand in marriage. And what do those apples represent? Scholars of mythology tend to land on the ideas of worldly temptation (the feeling of belonging that comes with small town life?), romantic love (Leora?) and divine intervention (which is always a stone’s throw from romantic love).
“The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama” is a giddy trip to Mount Olympus by way of a semi on the I-40.
The Kenyon Review (out of Kenyon College) has a long and storied history that dates back to 1939. They accept short fiction (up to 7,500 words) and flash fiction (up to three pieces of up to 1,000 words each) submissions via their Submittable portal.
In the past, their submission window has been open in the month of September. Keep an eye on their submissions page for notification of the planned themes for their 2027 issues—you will have the option to identify your work for general submission or one of the specific themes.
The Kenyon Review strongly encourages submitters to familiarize themselves with their previously published work. Subscriptions are available here, and anyone can read up to five free pieces per month in their archive.
There is no fee for submission, and they pay for work—$0.08 per published word of prose (minimum $80, maximum $450).
Read more of Kate Tooley’s great work at their website.
Thanks very much to Kate Tooley and The Kenyon Review for delivering us a delicious bushel of “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama”.
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Thanks for the food for thought today 📚✨🕰️