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“Blue Rain” by Daniel Doen Silberberg
During the day, I taught English to junkie kids at Morris High, deep in the East Bronx. At night, I wrote and played music at a Soho recording studio way downtown in Manhattan. After that I would stay up late drinking cheap Scotch from sea-green bottles and watching old movies. I liked the Marx Brothers’ free-floating insanity and W. C. Fields’s misanthropic grace. It was both entertainment and avoidance.
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“Power Play” by Cynthia Dockrell
Dad is still next to the phone, looking at the place where Mom was just standing. Normally he would follow her into the other room and say something like, “Now wait just a goddamn minute,” but nothing has been normal lately. Instead he turns to me—I have been setting the table with the good silver and linen—and raises his eyebrows. I almost feel sorry for him. . . .
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“Bad Birds” by John Nelson
Some superstitions have persisted into modern times. There are still Amazonian farmers who think that nightjars are messengers of malign spirits, while in my birding travels in Asia and Africa, I have been taken aback by the number of locals passionate in their fear and hatred of owls. To call a belief, or feeling, a superstition is not to say it has no ground in reality.
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“Displaced” by Norma Marder
I have lost my place, transplanted from a tiny island to the mainland, from a
village where my roots lie forty years deep to a village of friendly strangers, from
the open sea to a river, from wild forests and surf to a nature preserve of mowed
meadows and manicured trails. From a place where nature rules to a place where
the human hand lies on everything.
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“Deviled Eggs” by Jill Noel Kandel
Since the autopsy showed no wound present—this was not always the case;
previously in similar murders there had been wounds—the death was reportedly
caused by the bewitched smoke emitted from the gun. The evidence, deemed
credible by the Kalabo District Court, created no real commotion, and the judge
accepted it into court documentation. Deliberation began. The conviction of the
gun owner came as no surprise. Nor did his prison sentence. The case, briefly
discussed around the village, held little particular interest. Perhaps the villagers
were tired of the same old story.
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“The Art of War” by Sarah Aswell
For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me a carved jade stamp, the handle in the shape of a dragon, with the words warrior poet inscribed in Korean characters on the bottom. He also gave me a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the inside already marked with the red ink of the stamp. My brother and sister received the same thing for their thirteenth birthdays, though the bottoms of their stamps were inscribed with different words. Neither of them read the book.
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“Complexion” by Amy Leach
“To whom, then, does the earth belong?” said the dragon as he was being slain. “Sometimes it seems to belong to dragons; at other times to dragon gaggers. Sometimes it seems to belong to the hot harmattan wind . . . then to the descuernadragones, the wind that dehorns
dragons . . . and then to the doldrums. Sometimes it seems to belong to the slaves, when the sea parts to let them through, and sometimes to the sea when the sea does not part.
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“Did Not Speak” by Steven Coughlin
I wanted my brother to die, or I wanted the wires stuck into his arms to wrap around his twenty-one-year-old body and never let go, the white hospital sheets enough to finally make him good.
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“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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