Sam Ruddick, a staff writer at Luna Park, has a fantastic new story in the latest The Threepenny Review, their Summer 2010 issue. The entire issue is actually really good, with Javier Marías on the intrigue of Venice, poetry from Henri Cole and David Mason, editor Wendy Lesser on science fiction, and more.

Ruddick’s story, “Leak,” is hard to summarize. On the surface, it is a simply told love triangle with a car crash and some discussion about pasta and plumbing. But—like much of Raymond Carver’s fiction, a writer this story seems to channel—the prose vibrates, and the emotional life of the characters exist below a murky surface, so any “meaning” the story might have seems to arise for the reader somewhere just after the final period. The characters, the story even, never quite get to it. It’s nothing you can put into words. It’s a nice feeling, something from nothing.

Here’s the disarming first paragraph, one of the best I have read in some time:

I was telling Peyton about a friend of mine who’d seen a documentary on polar bears one day and quit his job in marketing the next; he’d moved to Alaska and gone to work for an environmental non-profit, and I thought there must have been something wrong with him, because he’d always been so business-minded in the past, and the polar bear thing came out of nowhere.