Selections
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Essays
“Scented” by Laura-Rose Russell
My arrangement with Ed was informal, to say the least. When I had approached him about setting up a yurt and living on his land, he saw a chance to have a pair of eyes and ears on his satellite farm; his main operation was on top of a mountain in Roxbury, where it was too cold for lilacs, and most of the year the lilacs fended for themselves. Once I was established on the land, Ed called every week or two to ask about snowdrifts and downed trees, the state of the fences, and whether or not I had seen any deer. I never lied to him, but I often waited until after I had read the tracks to call.
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“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.
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“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.
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Fiction
“Chicago” by John Fried
Two college seniors sit in a café in a Midwestern college town. Crowds of people pour in to escape the snow. The boy and girl know each other well, and they don’t. They have been together for seven weeks. Their understanding of each other centers on past love lives, confusion about the future, and a vast exploration of each other’s bodies. They need something to move the relationship forward, or it will die.
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“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.
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“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.”
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Poetry
“That Sweet, Sweet Evolution Thing” by Catie Rosemurgy
Sex: mist-shrouded,
rhythmic
island.
Science:
bold canoe.
There are reasons for our strange positions . . .
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“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.
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“The First Husband Buried” by Tana Jean Welch
After eight years of empty threats,
all I can do is watch him study the high
lamp over our bed, his mind knitting
a noose from ties he never wore.
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