In This Side of Water , Maureen Pilkington’s bright debut collection, precise and vivid language delivers flawed characters to their moments of reckoning. A married woman goes to the cemetery to resurrect her father; a young girl at a beach club witnesses her parents’ infidelity; an icy New Year’s Eve leads a devoted husband to violent clarity; a teenager spies on her mother and a Catholic priest; a Russian “dancer” visits her American husband and plays a dangerous game. In these sixteen stories, the backdrop of water—the Long Island Sound, the sulfur polluted Monangahela River, a koi pond, a basin of holy water, a tear in a boy’s eye—provides a salve for these characters, ferrying them to personal ports of renewal and resolution. "Brutally eloquent. A mesmerizing collection with a heat seeking eye for brilliant humor and intense passionate loves."- Ernesto Quinonez , author of the bestselling novel Bodega Dreams "Filled with humor, honesty, and wonderfully perceptive details, these suspenseful stories, told in an original voice, delight and illuminate."- Sheila Kohler , author most recently of Once We Were Sisters "These are brave stories. Pilkington seems willing to go anywhere she needs to for a story, and fully inhabit any character. This Side of Water is a wide-ranging and darkly beautiful collection of stories."- Peter Orner , author of Esther Stories "Maureen Pilkington's This Side of Water reminds you that the brief glimpse offered by the short story form can stop and startlingly recharge your heart. In all of these stories the dialogue throws sparks as it reveals the ways that vulnerable people talk who feel the competing needs to evade and to give themselves over to truthfulness. The veil lifts here on compulsions resulting from uncontainable desires; it lifts here on private longing and guilt and fear. Like the sensuous energies of water, these stories alter your body's responsiveness to the world, inviting you to experience new aliveness."- Kevin McIlvoy , novelist and short story writer, is author of At the Gate of All Wonder and 57 Octaves Below Middle C . Maureen Pilkington ’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in anthologies, journals and magazines including The Antioch Review; Ploughshares; Puerto del Sol; Confrontation; Bridge: Art & Literature in Chicago; Orchid Literary Review; MSR Fiction Anthology; Fiction Southeast; Punctuate; Santa Barbara Review; The Pedestal Magazine; Literary Mama; Still Point Arts Quarterly; CoveyClub.com; Red Rock Review; Confrontation; The Blotter Magazine; The Weston Magazine Group ; and numerous others. Her work has also been read live WCOM, FM. Pilkington worked in book publishing and received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently writing a collection of personal essays, and a novel about a friendship between two women that begins at a Catholic boarding school. Pilkington is also the founder and director of a writing program that brings authors into the inner-city schools of Manhattan to teach writing. Born in New York, Pilkington splits her time between Rye and Manhattan. This Side of Water Stories By Maureen Pilkington Regal House Publishing, LLC Copyright © 2019 Maureen Pilkington All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-947548-74-9 Contents Dedication, Quote, Phosphorescence, Float, Blue Tip Shore Club, Turquoise Water Behind Him, In The Beach Chair, Vapor, Toward The Norwegian Sea, Sounds Skimming Over The Atlantic, Not That Kind Of View, Dreaming Over The Monongahela River, Tide Pool, Nudes In A Green Pond, Crowded Pond, Must Be Near The Hudson, Two Pigs And A Circle Of Palm Trees, White Caps, The Water In Alexander's Eyes, Holy Water, Past The Clubhouse, Effects Of The Waterfront, Acknowledgements, CHAPTER 1 PHOSPHORESCENCE FLOAT I swam out to the float alone, the one that was anchored farthest from the beach, and lay down between the seagull stuff that had dried in so many spots. From there I could see the beach club members at a beautiful distance. I could see Mr. Fieldings' orange fish waving above his cabana, and him, sitting in front of his domain, doing accounting on a bridge table in his bright orange bathing suit, the little kind that stretched like balloon fabric over his privates. He used rocks, as smooth and oval as eggs laid from large birds, to weigh down stacks of bills and orders from his liquor store. His wife still wore bikinis and gold loop earrings, because they had no children. Mrs. Fieldings was the head buyer for Bergdorf Goodman over in Scarsdale and had me working there on Saturdays, modeling pre-teen dresses. She just pulled me off the diving board line-up one day and gave me this job that paid in clothes. Luckily, my friends never recognized me in a dress without my nose clip and hair as bone dry as the sand. The Fieldings were landmarks to my left from my vantage point out on the float — the lifeguard, my center marker on his giant wooden high c