From first story, “Over the Bridge”
It was another one o’clock on another Friday, and there I sat in Mrs. Zohorian’s office for our weekly meeting. Ever since Mom died, the school thought it would help me to “talk things out,” but I knew it helped them too, maybe more than it was supposed to help me.
Mrs. Z was an Alaska of a woman—gigantic thighs, multiple chins, and sausage-like fingers. She sat on her padded office chair and asked question after question in a soft voice: “Ella, you feeling better this week?”
“About the same,” I said.
Mrs. Z scribbled something on her notepad. I scanned her office. Inspirational posters lined the walls—a picture of a girl running up stairs with the word “Perseverance” across the top, two kids in polo shirts playing chess with “Strategy” hanging above them, and spring flowers blossoming with “Resilience” in all capitals. I wondered where Mrs. Z bought these posters. Was there a store for high school counselors?
“What class did I pull you out of?” Mrs. Z popped in a mint to battle her breath. Altoids couldn’t handle her stuff, though.
“Math.”
“What were you studying?”
“Stuff on triangles—the Pythagorean Theorem and Soh Cah Toa.”
“Soh Cah what?”
“It’s just this way of remembering what to do for sine and cosine.”
Sometimes Mrs. Z hoped that generic questions would lead to specific answers. I knew her strategy.
Loss Angeles Description:
In this superb debut collection of short stories, Mathieu Cailler weaves tales which bring to life the deeply-human experience with loss and its range of outcomes. From loneliness to recovered relationships, from despair to redemption, from heartbreak to humor, these fifteen stories illuminate the sadness, bewilderment, conflict and ultimate hope which can come from each human being’s inevitable encounters with loss.
Author Laurie Alberts writes: “LOSS ANGELES doesn’t focus on the bright lights of Tinseltown, but rather on the quiet day-to-day pain of marginalized people paralyzed by loss, poor choices, obsessions, and love. These subtle, beautifully wrought, and richly realized stories showcase Cailler as an intrepid fiction writer who is always compassionate to his characters and their moral quandaries.”
