Rick Rofihe is the author of Father Must, a collection of short stories published in 1991 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, Open City, Unsaid, Swink, and on fictionaut.com, slushpilemag.com and epiphanyzine.com. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, SPY, and on mrbellersneighborhood.com. He has taught MFA writing at Columbia University, and currently teaches privately in New York City. He is a member of PEN, was an advisor to the Vilcek Foundation for their 2011 prizes in the field of literature, and the judge of the annual RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest for Open City. Rick is the founding publisher of Anderbo (1971) and the founding publisher and one of three founding editors of anderbo.com (2005).
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Father MustStoriesFrom"Satellite Dish"
I like a crusty bread. Last spring, when the man who sold my son the satellite dish told him that the signal wasn’t coming in good because of the big old elm tree across the road by the house, that it was getting in the way of the reception, everyone—my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandsons, and then, because everyone else was, even the man—looked at me. I loved that tree. It was always there. It would always make me feel good to walk in the yard through its patterned shadow on my way into the house. But then, across the road, there was the satellite dish. I said they could chop the tree down but I wanted every bit of wood from it cut and stacked in a pile by itself. And though I hadn’t done it for years, since we’d got an electric stove and a furnace, I started back using the old wood stove, which we’d left in the kitchen mostly for looks. It’s better to cook bread in a wood stove anyway. You can tell the difference not just in the crust but also in taste.
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Father MustStoriesFrom"Read Chinese"
… sometimes in the coffee and pastry shops here in Chinatown I mimic the words I hear, but very softly. If you do it, don’t get too loud, because then it sounds like an echo, and people start looking around.
Chinese, spoken, is such a pleasing language. So many tones – it’s like singing. Since I don’t know what I’m saying, I never try to use those words when it comes my turn to order. I say, “One of those, one of those, one of those, one of those, and one of those. And one of those.” All in one tone. Not so pleasing.
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Father MustStoriesFrom"Jelly Doughnuts"
Simmi’s only been in New York three weeks, but the second night she was here Buck took her to a coffee place he knew, and now Simmi makes sure he takes her there every night. Maybe if there’s somewhere else they have to be, something one of them has to do, they’ll skip a night, but they couldn’t miss too many, because then it would become something they used to do. And that would make it part of the past. And what she thinks is part of the past Simmi won’t consider.
Father Must:Stories
“Rick Rofihe’s stories have bulging motor nerves and threadlike muscles. They are contour almost without mass; lines of fierce magnetic energy with only a dusting of iron fillings to reveal their course. They are elusive, but not in the sense of escaping us. It is more as if we are unable to find them, and then they spring out at us; we are not sure from where.” —Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times [on Father Must]
“Mr. Rofihe can be surprisingly effective, with a quirky tenderness. Oddly touching, the interest here lies not in the stories’ mundane incidents, but in things barely hinted at: beneath this calm surface, powerful currents flow.” —Bruce Bawer, The Wall Street Journal [on Father Must]
“These surgically precise slices of intelligent life are distinguished by virtuosic phrase-making and fetchingly off-beat specifics.” —Bruce Allen, The New York Times Book Review [on Father Must]