Contributions by Dorothy Spears
Dorothy Spears is an arts journalist, and frequent contributor to the culture pages of the New York Times. “Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories about Flying,” an anthology she published in 2009 with Open City Books/Grove, is in some ways inspired by Borges’ fascination with taxonomies. Including short fiction and non-fiction, by a range of authors, from Orville Wright, Amelia Earhart, and James Salter, to Mary Gaitskill and David Sedaris, it attempts to trace the evolution of air travel from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficient—and often dehumanizing—means for distributing masses of people around the planet. “The Birthday Card” is Spears’s first published work of fiction.
The Birthday Card
Dorothy Spears
An impotent man on vacation, so potent at work, keeps going at his wife every night, every afternoon. “I need to prove that I’m norm…I mean, that I’m all right,” he whispers, with coiled desperation.
The wife buries her face into a synthetic pillowcase, recalling a discussion they’d had a decade ago about a birthday card from George. He’d accused her of trying to ruin him, citing her need to discuss the birthday card as an attempt to undermine his confidence. It was only a few months after their wedding; he’d picked up her favorite wedding gift, a Navajo bowl, and smashed it against the oak floor of their apartment.
Today, after breakfast, and another failed attempt, she goes for a solitary bike ride. Down the road the workmen wave and grunt “Salaut.” They are splitting boulders … Read More »
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