Fiction by Edward Porter
Download “A Proposal” by Edward Porter
She was late. She was always late, and he was used to waiting for her like this, in a stupor of nerves and fever. Gerald sat in a Windsor chair, looking down from the window on the descending terraces of formal gardens outside the hotel room. The Virginia hills resort swam in flowers: crocuses in the gardens, tulips in vases, rose-pattern drapes and bedspread. It was stuffy; it stank of old money. All the better, he felt, for secret fucking.
Edward Porter’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Booth, Barrelhouse, and Inch Magazine, and has been anthologized in Best New American Voices 2010. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and was a Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently he is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, where he is a fiction editor for Gulf Coast.