"The Last Worders" by Karen Joy Fowler / Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

“Always a river. Sometimes in your mind. Sometimes in the gorge. Either way, a river.”

Karen Joy Fowler is a writer you likely know. Maybe from her 2022 historical novel “Booth,” which tells the story of the Booth family—John Wilkes and his siblings—leading up to Lincoln’s assassination. Maybe you’ve read 2013’s “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” of which Carmen Maria Machado wrote “I took reluctant breaks from the final pages to be comforted by my girlfriend, wanting to propel myself straight through to the end but unable to do so without being held.” Maybe it was 2004’s “The Jane Austen Book Club,” a New York Times bestseller that made it to the silver screen.

I was not familiar with Karen Joy Fowler’s short stories, and Shoutout offered me the great gift of stumbling upon “The Last Worders” (5,800 words) in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Originally published in 2007, it’s just waiting there to be imbibed. Go on, drink it.

It’s my favorite kind of short story—a very w-i-d-e one.

I’ve heard so many writing gurus preach about how short stories MUST be written as miniatures; tiny cast, single location, “you only get one story turn.” About how they should be centered around small, personal epiphanies. I’ve always bristled at those pronouncements. I like twenty pounds of clementines in my five-pound-bag, thank you very much.

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“The Last Worders” is one of those stories that gets to everything, and it doesn’t feel overambitious for going there. While reading it, I felt as if something like this had to have been birthed, that it wasn’t something that could have been built in increments, but was instead unspooled completely in one sitting, in a Jack-Kerouac-typing-directly-on-a-paper-roll way.

So what exactly does this story do?

For one thing, it gives us a one-thousand-year history of the fictional European town in which it’s set (San Margais), which hangs over the edge of a deep chasm. There’s an 839-step staircase cut into the interior of that cliff that leads down to a river. Enslaved people carried river water in clay pitchers up the stairs to the town, then trekked back down with the empties, day and night, until an uprising and the river running dry brought slavery there to an end. We get the religious, economic and political situation in the town detailed as story along with a very Garcia-Marquez-like fantasticism, including statues crying milky tears and poets “imprisoned and tortured until they couldn’t remember their own names much less their own words.”

We also get a show stopping love story; a triangle between the two women at the story’s center (our unnamed narrator and her traveling companion Charlotta) and Raphael Kaplinsky, a boy they had met in high school—a motorcycle-riding South African who was “ardent and oracular.” A boy who the two women spend the better part of a year competing for before he exited their lives.

Read this without falling for a character (or the writer), I dare you: “He was the very first person to use the word later to end a conversation. Using the word later in this particular way was a promise. It was nothing less than messianic.”

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The best part, though? The story’s slow-building roll.

We meet the narrator and Charlotta in the opening paragraph as they arrive in San Margais. As we move along with them, we understand that they’re very close. Then we get the sense they’re sisters. Then—20% of the way through the story, mind you—we learn they’re twins, from the sound of it identical.

What writer chooses to take their sweet time with such an important detail? Karen Joy Fowler do.

But wait, there’s more. We’re nearly halfway through our 5,800 words when we finally get our inciting incident: The sisters hired a detective to find Raphael, and he’s tracked down by his credit card trail…all the way to San Margais. “We had come to San Margais to make him choose between us.”

A very interesting and very effective way of setting a story hook deeply.

I’ll leave it to you to find out exactly what “The Last Worders” is / are. It’s rolled out and assembled in the same funky way the rest of this big-top-of-a-circus-tent is. Even the story’s ending is delivered before the story’s end.

There’s nothing simple about “The Last Worders” except how pleasurable a ride it is. If you choose to go there, though, definitely take the stairs.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is “an Occasional Outburst, an arrow shot into the future, a harbinger, a break from the daily meh, a lightness, a laugh, an incredibly serious archiving of a moment, a cinder from an old star set to light once more in the hands of readers.”

They are also an old-fangled zine, “1/2-legal-sized paper…saddle-stitched, running about 52 – 64 pages, printed in black ink on white or ivory 30% recycled paper with a cardstock cover.” They generally publish in June and November and were established in 1996 with contributors ranging from the very-well-known to the “many more whose name you may not—and that there finding and reading new-to-us voices is one of the joys of existence.”

As submission guidelines go, the fiction they publish “tends toward but is not limited to the speculative” with a word count of up to 40,000. Submissions need to be old-school-printed-out-and-mailed-in, along with a SASE with a Forever Stamp for a reply, to the address in the submission link above.

“The Last Worders” was included in Fowler’s 2010 short story collection “What I Didn’t See and Other Stories” out of LCRW’s Small Beer Press. Check out more from Karen Joy Fowler at her website.

Many thanks to LCRW and Karen Joy Fowler for the scintillating “The Last Worders.”

~*~

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