There you are across the wide pool calling to me from the other side telling me about the swim and how it felt and how hungry you are now, hungrier than you’ve ever been, the hunger like a roaring inside, like you could eat a whole loaf of bread with peanut butter and call it a sandwich and how the feeling underwater goes below words and comes up the other side, eyes stinging a little from chlorine, water dripping from your nose and in the distance some kid shouts MARCO, answered by a chorus of POLO, a call & response of youth which you no longer belong to and these things I can only hear in the distance as you wave to me in your swim cap, as I hold my breath & push off from the side, headed for the deep end, high dive looming with its cannonball lessons of life.

—A much distilled version, “Free Swim,” appeared in 50-Word Stories (12 July 2018).

Guy Biederman

teaches “low fat fiction” and is the author of four collections of short prose: Edible Grace (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), Soundings and Fathoms: Stories (Finishing Line Press, 2018), House Samurai (Iota Press, 2006), and Parts & Labor (Thumbprint Press, 1992). His stories have appeared in dozens of venues including Carve, daCunha, Flashback Fiction, KYSO Flash, Sea Letter, Third Wednesday, and Exposition Review, where he was twice a Flash 405 winner. In 2018, his flash was nominated for the Best of the Net anthology.

Born in the Chihuahua desert near the Mexican border, Guy grew up on a stingray in Ventura, learned to write in the Peace Corps during a civil war in Guatemala, honed his craft pulling weeds and planting flowers as a gardener in San Francisco, and later received his M.A. from San Francisco State, where his teaching career began. He’s been a creative-writing instructor since 1991, and he’s also worked as a bookstore clerk, gardener, ad sales rep, sports writer, and publisher. For 12 years he published the literary magazine Bust Out Stories and a handful of books by bay area writers.

Guy hosts The Floating Word on Radio Sausalito, lives on a houseboat with his wife and two salty cats, and walks the planks daily.

Author’s website: https://www.guybiederman.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ This Day Afloat: Reflections of Life on the Water, Biederman’s blog