Selections
- Home
- Selections
Essays
“Tribal Bloods” by John Wenke
Michael Marlow makes a good living as an actuary for State Farm Insurance. He figures out the likelihood of people living to eighty or dying at sixty. People who live to eighty have a high statistical probability of surviving to ninety. Personally, none of it matters. At the individual level, all statistics are irrelevant. There is more to it, he claims. Computers, demographics, environmental factors—these things and more come into play. He needs to fill out the time, immerse himself in issues and entanglements that justify a forty-hour work week.
READ MORE
“Decoding the Flag” by Cheryl Dietrich
One summer when I was eleven, I bullied my two younger brothers into helping me open a lending library in our grandparents’ garage. We borrowed books from all our friends, sorted them alphabetically by author into battered bookcases, and set up a card file. Finally, to legitimize the venture, we pooled our money and purchased a twenty-five-cent flag. A library should have a flag.
READ MORE
“The Watermark” by Susan McCallum-Smith
A year after my parents separated, I saw my father on the other side of a narrow street. He walked straight by without any gesture of greeting. No one else was around. It dawned on me, after a second or so, that he hadn’t recognized me. I hadn’t changed from a goose to a swan, or some such nonsense, I had simply had a haircut and stopped dressing like a boy. . . . I paused, aware that I felt nothing more than an aloof curiosity, and watched him walk away. If I were fanciful I would say that this was the moment I became a writer.
READ MORE
Fiction
“Drive” by Aaron Gwyn
They were driving back from Wewoka Lake on the narrow stretch of blacktop east of town. They’d been fighting all morning, and she’d been drinking all morning, and now she was drunk. He didn’t think she was pretty when she was drunk. Her face turned red and rigid. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the Charger, staring out her window, and he’d turned the radio off so he could think. All his thoughts were mean and desperate. He couldn’t get them to stop circling. They hit the straightaway right after the curve by the brick plant, trees on both sides, the black oaks leaning so that the road seemed like a tunnel, and the light inside it a strobe of shadow and sun.
READ MORE
“In Lapland” by Christopher Merkner
On Thursday my wife returns from work and says she needs some color in the house, can’t live in this cell-hole another minute, what have we done to bring ourselves to this way of living at our age, we aren’t twenty-five-year-old twits, not anymore. Country Rill is the green she shows me in a magazine. “Look at that,” she says, thrusting the glossy in my face, “and tell me it wouldn’t change everything.”
READ MORE
“The Naked Man” by Geoffrey Becker
I hadn’t always been the Naked Man. While his head was mine—dark, curly hair, glasses, an earnest, somewhat baffled look on a middle-aged face with an almost blue beard line and what I like to think of as a dueling scar on my left cheek (actually, I had a cyst removed there, and the doctor botched the job)—the body belonged to my wife’s former boyfriend, a man with the unlikely name of Garth, who taught earth science at a high school in Ohio. Garth had posed for other paintings, too, but this was the last, and the only one he’d done nude.
READ MORE
Poetry
“That Sweet, Sweet Evolution Thing” by Catie Rosemurgy
Sex: mist-shrouded,
rhythmic
island.
Science:
bold canoe.
There are reasons for our strange positions . . .
READ MORE
“Wade” by Shirley Stephenson
We enter Pacuare by river. A swarm of eyeballs rises to the surface. Crocodiles lunge at the boats. We look to the canopy. Grant us a cotinga, or a toucan. Anything above this waterline. We know the story of the Israeli who died last week. When they pulled him up, only his hand was missing. Like everything here, the croc was defending its territory—attacking with gusto and bright, deadly colors.
READ MORE
“Beyond the Crepe Myrtles, Blue Yodel” by R. T. Smith
The snake in his new outfit coiled and shivered.
The mockingbird from high in the live oak mocked.
Mama on the porch rocker cleaned her two barrel
and sang how looping a skin over the rail top
might make a stubborn sky shake down a spurt of rain.
READ MORE
