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ISBN: 978-1-964277-71-4, 190 pages, $16.95 (+ shipping)
Release Date: April 10, 2026
The Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $22/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
Richard Holinger’s fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews appear in The Southern Review, Boulevard, Hobart, North American Review, The Iowa Review, Western Humanities Review, SIR, Witness, Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. Books include Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays); North of Crivitz (poetry); Down from the Sycamores (chapbook); Not Everybody’s Nice, winner, 2012 Split Oak Press Flash Prose Contest. Anthology nominations include Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions (2025); publication in Best Microfiction 2025; and a Best American Essays 2018 “Notable.” He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from UIC and has taught on the university, community college, and secondary school levels. Richard has two grown children and lives with his wife in rural northern Illinois.
Richard Holinger, in his most recent collection, Unimaginable Things, expertly explores the mendacity behind the mundane. The lives of Holinger’s characters are extraordinarily ordinary, and so much so life itself is a peril, and “The only way for a man to get something to happen that is extraordinary is to push himself,” from a cliff. Holinger walks the line between real and the unreal with virtuosic precision, a craftsman at the peak of his craft. ~Ralph Pennel is the author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In and the Editor-in-Chief of Midway Journal
Richard Holinger’s stories are brief, piercing, and addictive—echoing Chekhov’s clarity, Dybek’s strangeness, and García Márquez’s haunted magic. Unimaginable Things fulfills the promise of the short story as “a glimpse caught from the corner of the eye in passing,” lingering long after you finish the last page and turn off the lights, continuing to glow the way the best books do. ~John McNally, The Book of Ralph
Holinger’s stories stroll along the backroads and byways of America, inviting us to glimpse the people and places and see ourselves reflected. These stories are lives captured in brief, fleeting moments that linger with the reader well beyond the final page. ~B.J. Hollars, author of Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief
Richard Holinger’s collection Unimaginable Things reads like a fever dream, a dive into leech-infested waters, that time you and a childhood friend strapped on boxing gloves and agreed that punches to the face were acceptable. All three leave you gasping. As you dive into Hollinger’s stories, prepare yourself for cocaine binges, taxi drivers with gold on every finger. musings on Sarah Palin, and the wanderings across the American Midwest by a man named Henry. ~Bob Johnson, author of The Continental Divide
Richard Holinger is a master of the short short story voiced in American vernacular. His stories are always absurd, fantastic, and elusive—one step ahead of meaning. Still, trying to wrap your head around them is well worth the effort. Each story is a reward, delight. Hats off. ~Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Fat Time and Other Stories and Song of the Shank
I.
Even though Gina, my wife, asked Bev and the children over to swim, Gina goes in for a nap. She’s proud of our in-ground pool, so she’s asking people over all the time. Bev, because she’s family, doesn’t mind Gina going inside. Gina’s bulbous body needs rest, maybe so the baby she’s carried eight months will be able to sleep, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the heat.
To tell the truth, I’m a little nervous about having a child; there are so many things that can go wrong. But out here, away from the city, a man can breathe. Weekend houses can be a pain, lots of work for a little time, but when you first step out of the car and you’re under an oak tree and you hear acorns crack under your shoes, it’s like what aspirin does for a headache: makes the pain disappear.
Bev says Bob’s not doing anything, which means he’s watching television, so I call him, and when he suggests fishing, I call our other brother, Pete. Bob, not big on the sport, loves the beer and chatter. Even Pete, a serious fisherman, doesn’t expect much excitement, given it’s afternoon.
On days like these, fall creeps underground and tickles the roots of older trees that then begin to blush. We’re wearing lightweight shirts, faded blue jeans or cut-off shorts, and old sneakers for walking up the creek. Bev’s children are still in the pool when we’re ready to leave. Bev asks if I’m sure the .22 rifle is out of reach. She doesn’t approve of my keeping it in the house, but I insist on having insurance against catastrophe. We own the biggest lot around, and we’re half a mile through woods to our nearest neighbor.
II.
We walk the gravel road that twists through floodplain trees where only pink bull thistles and yellow lance-leaved goldenrod show above grass growing to our waist. Summer has dried up the swamp where an abandoned wood duck house tilts on its stand. Oak trees and underbrush give a few brief glimpses into the wood’s heart, then close again, tight and thorny.
Once beyond our property gate, walking on the newly blacktopped road, we talk of baseball, movies, restaurants—anything but family. We move along as slowly as the laziest, or as quickly as the most anxious. We pass fields of corn and soy and pastures where beef cattle graze. The land rolls gently, soft and rich.
Bob and Pete get going on a baseball article by Roger Angell in a magazine I haven’t read. When we near the footpath to Lock’s Bend, I tell them to go on.
“I think I’ll try for bass down at Miller’s Dam.”
A few seconds of silence separates us more than parting will. Then they climb a fence with one barbed strand and begin across a broad September field to trees where a hill drops down to the creek. Now and then I look back. They walk with their heads down, as if looking for snakes coiled in the green chaos.
III.
A size four hook is on my line, maybe too large for what the dam offers, but my tacklebox offers many different ways to go. I’m thinking about which direction to take when a man rises out of the field and leaps the barbed wire fence. His beard is full and gold, his jeans and wool shirt heavy as winter, his engineer boots dull as lead. He holds a metal rod with a plastic reel, the kind of equipment people no longer use.
He climbs the ditch and walks onto the road, his boots scuffling the shiny surface.
“Afternoon,” he says. “Where’s the fishin good?”
There’s cream in his voice, and his eyes are blue as rain.
“Depends on what you’re after,” I tell him. “Up at the dam there’s smallmouths, over at Lock’s Bend there’s carp and cats.”
The man shifts weight from boot to boot in the middle of the road that’s only shaded here and there by a gangly oak with bare limbs at the top that now look dead.
“Well, is it better for bass or carp, in your perspective?”
The way a stranger chooses his words gives away a lot about himself.
“Creek’s low right now,” I begin, then watch his eyes shift over my shoulder. I turn to see what he must see, a dark green Pontiac, spotted with rust, approaching slowly, passing us, then, once beyond us, muscling onto the shoulder where its engine continues to grumble. A boy who might have turned eighteen gets out the passenger side and looks at me as though we might have met for lunch last week and promised to keep in touch. The driver stays behind the wheel.
The man with the fishing pole speaks again: “Mind gettin in?”
IV.
I think that this is what my father must have felt ten years ago when one day his heart froze up. I turn back to the field and see my brothers gliding over the prairie grass. I yell their names and see their heads turn around to look.
“You!” says the boy in the car. “I wouldn’t do that.”
I watch my brothers’ knees spear the thick, green waves, their poles knitting the air as they work their arms.
“Hey!” Pete yells.
“Hold it!” advises Bob, once a lieutenant in Vietnam.
The bearded man drops his fishing rod on the road and walks over to me.
“We want you in the car.”
He grabs the upper part of my arm.
Bob hurdles the fence, cutting his hand on the wire. “Get your hand off my brother.”
The man does as he’s told. I step back. The driver, still inside the car, hasn’t moved. Pete comes over; neither he nor Bob has his fishing gear. The bearded man goes to the car, shoves the boy in back, and takes his place beside the driver. The door slams and the car roars back into the road.
V.
By the time we get back to the house where Bob’s children laugh and splash in the pool, we’re making jokes about the incident. Bev is lifeguarding and reading Woman Today. She says she thinks Gina is still inside, asleep. We begin to tell Bev in marvelous detail about the adventure when a rusted green Pontiac pulls over the crest of the hill and pushes into the gravel parking area next to the lawn.
This time all three riders emerge, the driver the eldest, his thin body slicing the air. Bev gets out of her chair. The children stop their Marco Polo game to see if our guests brought any children.
“I’ll get the .22,” I tell Bob and Pete and go inside where the Marlin hangs in its leather case, grab a box of shells from the shelf, and head to the kitchen where I see the men fan out in front of Bob and Pete on the front lawn, just left of the gravel drive. The rifle holds eighteen shorts; I take time to load ten. One shot from a .22 long rifle bullet won’t stop a man, won’t even stop a winter woodchuck.
VI.
I don’t cock the lever action until I’m back beside Bob and Pete.
Bob says, “Look, this is private property. We’d like you off of it.”
At the sound of metal over oiled metal, the attention shifts, not to me, but to the rifle, now aimed at the ground slightly to the front and left of the phony fisherman.
The driver nods to me and says to Bob and Pete, “He comes with us,” and stops there, his final ultimatum.
Bev calls from the back steps, “I’ll phone the police,” and runs inside.
I wish she hadn’t brought in the law; even though it makes good sense, it somehow taints something pure, takes an event bordering on holy and turns it evil.
It’s then the bearded man walks forward and offers from his pocket, with rhythmical finesse, a wide, silver blade.
I pull up the rifle level with his chest and say, “Stay there.” He keeps coming in.
Bob tells me, “Shoot the bastard.”
“Look,” Pete says, his hand stretched out as though he wants the man to cut it, “we really don’t want you here.”
I think about how the bullet will enter the man’s chest, what it will do to him. I lower the front of the rifle until the sights settle on his right thigh, pull back the brass trigger, and listen to the hammer click neatly into the pin. My shoulder twitches with the kickback as the knife staggers, then mirrors the sun.
They move in as the children stand in the shallow water until it gets too hideous to watch.
VII.
Inside, on her bed, Gina sleeps on, undisturbed by the gunshot, surrounded by new homes going up in fields where always before the land has been prairie. Within her, our child floats above the Midwest, dreaming of things unimaginable to us.
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