©2024 Fable Group Inc.

Permanent Exhibit

By Matthew Vollmer
Permanent Exhibit by Matthew Vollmer digital book - Fable

Why read on Fable?

Discover social reading

Chat inside the ebook with emojis, comments and more

Annotate with notes, tabs, and highlights

Share or keep your notes private with our annotation features

Support the World Literacy Foundation

We donate 20% of every book sale to help children learn to read

Publisher Description

HATCHLING

Today, I watched a video of a black man who had been shot by a white police officer with the volume down because I didn’t want my son to see the black man’s blood-soaked shirt. I didn’t want to see it, either, but I kept watching. I didn’t turn the volume up when my son left the room, and I didn’t listen to a press conference given by the mother of another black man who had been shot dead by a white policeman. I didn’t read any comments. I wondered if words could change any mind that wasn’t already disposed to changing, and remembered that Lao Tzu had once written, “Those who are stiff and rigid are the disciples of death. Those who are soft and yielding are the disciples of life.” I picked up my phone, checked Instagram. I added words to a manuscript and wondered why anyone in their right mind—or wrong—would ever read it. I went upstairs to get a power strip and came back downstairs with something else, went back upstairs and then down again empty-handed, and imagined a future where I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I remembered to put ointment on the bumps on my arms caused by a mild skin condition I am just vain enough to halfheartedly manage. I read something about a presidential candidate who, according to an “insider,” never wanted to be president, but wanted to finish at a solid second place, so as to increase his popularity. I thought about this guy who lives in my neighborhood, a retired financial analyst who challenged me to find anything about him at all on the Internet because it just isn’t there, and who claims that there’s an impending economic collapse because banks are playing with pretend money and soon the billionaires will be buying up land like crazy and jacking up the prices, which means that nonbillionaires need to band together and buy land so that when the meltdown comes they can manage local foods/agriculture. I looked out my kitchen window at my neighbor’s lush garden, for which she won’t accept compliments, due to the amount of weeds she’s neglected to pull, and acknowledged to myself how it’s been so long since I’ve grown anything, and how there are zucchinis from that neighbor’s garden in my fridge, and how they’ll probably go bad because honestly I can’t say that I’m that big a fan of squash no matter how roasted and/or cheese-coated. Then, when my wife finished a string of texts by sending me, inexplicably, a chicken emoji, I did the only thing I could do: I filled up the whole text box with a square halo of rooster heads orbiting a line of baby chicks with their wings out, sitting in the bottom halves of their broken, just-hatched eggs.

No Reviews

About Matthew Vollmer

Matthew Vollmer was born in Asheville, North Carolina and grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is the author of two collections of short fiction—Gateway to Paradise (Persea, 2015) and Future Missionaries of America (MacAdam/Cage, 2009; Salt Publishing, 2010)—as well as a collection of essays: inscriptions for headstones (Outpost19, 2012). His work has appeared in Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Ecotone, New England Review, The Sun, Best American Essays, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. With David Shields, he co-edited FAKES: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (W. W. Norton, 2012), and he served as editor for The Book of Uncommon Prayer, an anthology of everyday invocations featuring the work of over 60 writers. A winner of a 2010 NEA grant for literature, he teaches in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he is an Associate Professor, and lives in Blacksburg with his wife and son.

Start a Book Club

Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!

FAQ

Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?

Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?

How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?

Do you sell physical books too?

Are book clubs free to join on Fable?

How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?

Error Icon
Save to a list
0
/
30
0
/
100
Private List
Private lists are not visible to other Fable users on your public profile.
Notification Icon
Fable uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB