FICTION by JERRY WHITUS
There was to be a wedding at the old Bethel Church, which seemed peculiar. As far as Edith knew, nothing happened there these days except club meetings or funerals for families with plots in the church’s ancient cemetery. Then came a jolt, the bride’s maiden name—Cotterill.

Edith spread the paper, The Sour Springs Record, on her kitchen table, so a strip of sunlight fell over a picture of the bride, shown standing alongside a horse. A handsome girl with a self-assured smile, dark hair that disappeared behind her shoulders. Raised in Houston, the article said, her father in investments, her mother some sort of artist who ran a gallery. A grandfather, Eldon Cotterill, now of Beaumont, had grown up in the Sour Springs community. No mention of the man’s wife, but there was timberland and an old homestead on a lake in the Thickets. Among the bride’s passions was historical preservation, and thus her fascination with the little church, which her grandfather’s father had helped build “the way they did in those days.”

REVIEWED by DOREEN THIERAUF
Hurry Please I Want to Know is Paul Griner’s second short story collection, following the release of his third novel, Second Life, in early 2015. This eclectic yet wonderfully coherent collection proves once again Griner’s acute grasp of the complex and slippery emotions leading from gladness to mourning. Throughout, his characters take the reader on rich and elegiac journeys, each of only a few moments’ duration.