Excerpt from Eveningland by Michael Knight, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The first thing she said to the boy that summer was, "What are you looking at?" Like a tough girl in some movie. He'd forgotten not to stare. She was pumping gas for a twin-engine Robalo at the time, one hand on her hip, the boy perched halfway up the steps between the dock and the snack bar. He poked the last of a hamburger in his cheek and walked down to where she stood.

"I'm Bragg."

He extended his hand. She didn't take it.

"I know who you are," she said.

The boy was so unused to hostility, life came so sweetly and easily to him, that he hardly recognized the resistance in her posture and her tone. Any other summer, the dock would have been lined with boats of various sizes, marina girls tending their needs, but on this day, there was only Dana Pint gassing the Robalo, rods craning up from their holders like insect legs, and the boy and his boat, a Boston Whaler skiff, a gift from his father on his fifteenth birthday, tied to a pylon at the end of the dock, stern tailing out into the bay on a receding tide.

"Knock, knock," he said.

"I've got a boyfriend. His name is Pat."

"You're supposed to say who's there?"

I asked the boy once about his fondness for knock-knock jokes and he said he liked how they were all the same but different, too, how words and names took on new meanings in the pattern. That may not be an exact quote but it's close. I remember being struck by the ready astuteness of his reply, as if he had wondered the same thing about himself.

Dana Pint squinted at the boy, lips pursed, a mean and wary look.

"You're standing here in this heat telling me a knock-knock joke?"

"That's right. I say knock, knock, you say . . ."

"Who's there?"

The boy said, "Orange."

Just then, the gas pump clicked, tank full, and Dana Pint rattled the nozzle back into its slot. For a second or two he believed she was going to let him finish the joke. But she brushed past him and on up the steps to the snack bar, splay-footed, legs so thin he could see inches of daylight between her thighs.

EVENINGLAND © 2017 by Michael Knight. "Water and Oil" originally appeared in The Southern Review and was listed as a Distinguished Story in The Best American Short Stories 2014 and noted for Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the Small Presses, 2015. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.