Seltzer

by Matthew Zanoni Müller

Once, when I was a young child visiting my grandparent’s house in Germany with my family, my grandmother turned and asked me from the kitchen whether I couldn’t be her little hero and go down to the basement to get a couple bottles of Seltzer. I called back while I ran from the living room to the basement that I could definitely be her little hero, and I charged down the big gray cement stairs and slowly started noticing that my legs felt too short for the big leaps I had to make. I fell forward and the stairs hit me and I crumpled into a pile at the bottom and began crying. First my brother came to see and started laughing from the top. Then my father rushed like the real hero he was and scooped me from the bottom of the steps with his hair flying wildly and long. He carried me into the kitchen with my brother grinning and my head bleeding and my grandmother turned to look and asked, “What, no Seltzer?”

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Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany in 1984. He received his BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Emerson College and is currently enrolled in Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. He lives in Upstate New York and is at work on a book of nonfiction stories with his father, entitled Drops On The Water: Childhood Stories from a Father and Son. He is also working on a collection of linked stories, What We Were Doing Here, one of which was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s March 2008 Fiction Open.