The first paragraph of Erika Schmidt’s “Story of a Family,” winner of the 2013 Nelson Algren prize for short fiction:
This is how the family looks in 1988: a husband, a wife, a daddy, a mama; two girls, two sisters, two daughters. One daughter is 5. The other is 2. They both have white-blonde hair that turns green in the chlorine at the country-club pool. The older daughter, the 5-year-old, takes swimming lessons there in the summer. The younger daughter, the 2-year-old, almost drowns one day when she falls into the big pool while the daddy isn’t looking. He gets her out with plenty of time to spare but he loses sleep over the image of her little body turned upside down under the water and the feeling of his bare feet trying to gain traction on the wet cement as he runs to her and the searing smell and taste of the chlorinated water rushing into his nose as he jumps in and her cold, wet bathing suit against his arms as he leans into the side of the pool crushing her to his chest while the 5-year-old cries watching from the fold-up lounge chair wrapped in a big towel.
Read the rest here. The story also can be downloaded as a PDF here. Previous SSFSs here.
The Dish 