A Found Note

 Sarah at found_zine shares the magic of found stuff. Sometimes it’s sad.

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A New George Saunders Novel Is Coming

Like his previous novel, Lincoln In The Bardo, this one focuses on death and the afterlife. Here is the blurb from Random House: 

“Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty three hundred and forty-three times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others: The powerful K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life. Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the loveseat, a man from a distant drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s post-death future.

With the acuity and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.”

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That’s Just How It Goes

The Line Between Truth and Fiction Is A Fine One

 

The Village Message Board - An Excerpt From Villager

From Villager by Tom Cox: “Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life. ...” This chapter from Villager is told entirely in the form of an online village message board.

 Judith Sparrow: Has anyone spotted a horse rug on their travels? Purple, with red stripes. Last seen up near Hood Gate. Any information appreciated. My Thomas is getting cold.

Terence Black: Fantastic fish and chips tonight at the Stonemason’s Arms. Just right. Mushy peas.

Diana Wilson: I had some last week. Overcooked.

Gary Oliver: Everyone keep their eye out there’s a drone around in the night sky been seen looking for something worth pinching.

Gary Oliver: Don’t suppose anybody has two concrete slabs they don’t need any more?

Terence Black: Be vigilant about scam phone calls. A number has been calling me. International. Says I have been in a car crash nonsense I haven’t.

Jennifer Cocker: Are Roger and Sheila OK? Haven’t seen them for a while. They’re very old and having trouble getting around now.

Sheila Winfarthing: We are fine. Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Cocker: Someone should go round and check on them. I can’t. I have the kids.

Sheila Winfarthing: I’m right here.

Gary Oliver: Anyone who has any engine oil they don’t need please let me know. It shouldn’t go to waste and can be used for heating my stone sheds.

Alan Rockwell: TALK ON OLD WOODCRAFT. WHAT HAVE WE LOST? UNDERHILL VILLAGE HALL. September 8th. 7 p.m. Alan Rockwell discusses woodland arts. SAMPLES FROM TALK: Sawn elm is often used for the partitions in cowsheds and other places where animals live, as it can cope with the kick of any beast. Cleft oak is often used for the rungs of ladders and can be trusted for its resilience. What does trimming a cleft with a froe mean? Find out. Snacks and non-alcoholic drinks. Entry £3.50.

Penelope Ralph: We have some oil you can have, Gary. But please can you return the drum afterwards.

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The Homeowners Association by Steve Vermillion - Eclectica Magazine

My wife is gone. I've been alone for years now. I work and come home. Nothing happens. My only real pleasure is Judy. She lives across the street. She's divorced and has zero interest in me. That's what I like about her. She has remote blond hair and emanates an infinite inaccessible love. I have little hope of ever making her mine, but maybe that's the point. What else is there to say of her? She has heart-shaped hips, caustic, incendiary eyes, and most of the time she's angry and bothered and is never happy to see me unless she is borrowing my leaf blower. She is the president of our homeowners association, though, so to be near her, I volunteer as the sergeant at arms for our monthly meetings. It's only an honorary position. I don't really have any authority. Still, I live for our monthly homeowners meetings. No one asks me to, but I like to create little appetizers and pass them around. The day before also leaves me time for working on my anxiety and maybe choosing something to wear.

Anyway, three pigs purchased the three lots next to my home. What are the odds? Each bought their own undeveloped lot. The association members didn't approve of the idea of pigs moving into the neighborhood, which I can understand. They didn't come right out and say it, but you just know when you know. I have nothing against pigs myself. My philosophy is live and let live, laissez faire. Grass is always greener. A friend in need. Things like that. Yes, there was an antipathy toward the pigs from the very beginning, but here's the deal—and it's just like my dad once told me—you give 'em a fair shake: men, women, children, even animals. You give them your trust and see if they take it away. Most of the time it'll surprise you the way they'll measure up. And that's the way I felt when the pigs arrived, though along with everyone else, I wondered what kinds of houses they would build. Just as worrisome was the very fundamental, self-reflecting question of what kind of people have pigs as neighbors?

How, we collectively wondered, would we ourselves be judged? And what next? Sheep, goats, cows, armadillos, all wanting to live next door? Our kids and theirs going to the same schools?

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Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon

Collage. US Postal Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Project Apollo Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Look closely at any moon landing photograph and you will find fine gray plus signs in a grid across each one—plus signs that allowed for distortion to be corrected + for distance and height to be calibrated from space as well as on the moon’s surface. That could stitch a panoramic sequence of images + plot the moon. Each Hasselblad camera the astronauts brought was fitted with a clear glass plate etched with this precise network, a réseau of stitches—pin­ning the moon to the moon to keep its surface and the vast black horizon in line. Reseau: a grid + a ref­erence marking pattern on a photograph or sewing paper + an intelligence network + a net of fine lines on glass plates + a foundation in lace.

+++

Look closely at many Emily Dickinson poems and you will find + signs that indicate a variant in a line. A variant may appear + above a word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem + stacked at the end like a solution to an equa­tion. Whole poems + sequences may be variants of one another. Dickinson did not choose among her variants, offering them as concurrent alternatives— evocative lace constellations left for us to hold up to our future sky as we try to align the wild nights + noons of her poems + epistolary impulses. Stitched across the surface of her work—plus signs that allow for + stray signals + distortion + that calibrate inte­rior vastness.

+++

Rather than the stunning aluminum-coated fabric of the Mercury crews stepping out of comic book frames of imagined interstellar travel, the astronauts who planted their feet on the moon were outfitted in the same glaring white as a wedding dress. A color in the future that will become as synonymous as silver with the zeitgeist of sixties space-age fabrics—avant-garde apparel made of paper and metal and mirrors and all that lamé, every garment a mise en abyme reflecting and replicating a future possible. Silver and white, twin colors that wax and wane in popularity across time, reappearing again and again when we most need to transport ourselves beyond whatever present moment in which we find ourselves suspended. Colors that carry us across the thin gray twilight line that separates us from a speculative future.

Fifty years into that future, it’s difficult to undo the images of those sonogramic white suits. The ghostly bulk of the astronauts’ bodies adrift on the moon now an afterimage in our collective consciousness. The exterior garment as luminous and otherworldly every day and intimate as the era’s conic Playtex bras. Chosen in part for the fabric’s superlative heat resistance, in part because its less reflective surface kept astronauts safer from the risk of dazzling themselves with their clothing while facing the unfiltered sunlight. Underneath this bright white micrometeoroid layer, underneath the layers and layers of nested silver insulation, the main pressurized body of the space suit is a simple Earthly blue.

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From Alterations by Cori Winrock

Grace Paley

 

Books are Made out of Trees

In the face of danger looming over the Old Oak and its many inhabitants, Leon, a grumpy badger, refuses to abandon his beloved book collection. Stubbornly, he remains in the Oak to read and enjoy the time he has left.

Via  Kuriositas

The Compound - Excerpt

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. 

“They had come from the hills behind the compound, south of the tennis court, slipping through a gap in the fence in the early morning. If we’d have thought to go around to the back of the house we might have seen them yesterday, slowly, slowly crossing the terrain and making their way toward us.

They were clearly exhausted: even the ones who were in good shape had cracked lips, were sunburned and covered in brown-gold desert sand. Some of them looked worse: there were three or four who had scrapes and bruises across their faces and arms. One of them, huge and hulking, had scrapes all across his chest, a gash on his leg, and an impressive black eye. I wondered if any of the boys had fought in the wars.

It was with some embarrassment that we led them to the grass to sit—they seemed a little surprised that there were no seats, but they didn’t complain. We brought them endless jugs of water and had some food ready to give them: toast with jam, bacon, eggs, bowls of baked beans. One of them lifted the bowl of beans to his face and poured it into his mouth like it was the final dribbles of milk in a cereal bowl. They’d had some supplies with them, they told us, but it wasn’t the same as real home-cooked food. It felt almost indecent, we girls rested and showered, gazing at the boys, dirty and exhausted, their eyes darting around the compound, and traveling inexorably back to us. I thought that the oldest might have been in his early thirties, while the youngest was surely no older than twenty. Even after three days in the desert they were beautiful. But we were beautiful too, and we sat straight and let them look.

“How many of you are there?” I asked, though I had counted already.

I had to ask, because it was the most important question.

“Nine,” one of the boys said. He had neatly trimmed brown hair and warm brown eyes, and sunburn across his neck and his collarbones.

One of the boys who had scrapes across his chest, who had introduced himself as Andrew, said, “One of the boys got lost. He won’t be coming.”

Yet another said, “How many of you are there?”

“Ten,” Mia said, and we all fell quiet as the boys looked at the girls, and the girls looked at the boys.

“We’ll show you around,” Candice said, getting suddenly to her feet. I knew what had motivated her into action; we all did. This was the rule of staying in the compound. It was what made people watch the show, day after day, and what people talked about during the ad breaks: you stayed in the compound only if you woke in the morning next to someone of the opposite sex. If you slept alone, you would be gone by sunrise. There were usually ten girls and ten boys to start with, but now, as the girls outnumbered the boys, one of us would be gone by tomorrow. “It’s too big a group to show around,” Mia said. “Candice, you take four and I’ll take five.”

If this plan was disagreeable to Candice she didn’t show it. I went with Candice, as did Jacintha. Eloise and Susie went with Mia. Becca and some of the other girls cleared the boys’ plates and brought them into the kitchen to clean up.

Candice took us to the west, the prettier side of the compound, where the maze lay, and the gardens and pond. Of the four boys in our group, I remembered only a few of their names. Candice walked slowly, keeping in mind the boys’ exhaustion, though they had perked up considerably, and were looking around with interest. We were showing them around like we were showing off our own property, and they were viewing it as though they had never seen it before.”

From The Compound by Aisling Rawle. Copyright © 2025 by Aisling Rawle.

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