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Trickery

Sometime in the early 1880s a medical doctor named Israel Wood Powell, superintendent for Indian Affairs for Coastal Indians in British Columbia, collected a raven rattle from the Tshimshian Indians. He sent the rattle to The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it remains. It is a percussive musical instrument, used…

Memories End

Your television flickers. You're alone, your wife on a week-long visit to friends, so you watch the late news. Tonight is entirely about the Berlin Wall: the Germanies reunite, laughing and weeping Germans chip away at the Wall itself. One has a carpenter's hammer, another a sledge, another a crowbar. The sight pleases you; the…

Hairy Men

The first time Sam ever left her children behind to go away by herself, they were two and five. It was a long time ago. She went to a hot springs resort, where she met a very hairy man. Because the man had been there before, and Sam had not, he offered to take her…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Guest Editor Alberto Alvaro Rios Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor Don Lee Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Assistant Fiction Editors Don Lee and Debra Spark Office Manager Renee Rooks Production Assistant Mariette Lippo Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistant: Julie Trevelyan. Typesetting: Gian Lombardo and InText Publishing Services. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter,…

Eighty Acres

It was just me and my brother Paul at the coops when Hondo come home with his new truck, ready to kill. He'd been down at Rose's, drinking hard, and as he lurched across the lawn I stepped out in front of him like a fool. You see, me and Paul, we're looking out for…

The House of Cleopatra

It was one hundred and seven that June day. The swamp cooler on the roof had lowered the temperature down to the high nineties, and the walls and furniture were damp to the touch. I felt clammy and restless but there was nowhere to go except to the shopping center. My husband had flown to…

Earnest Money

When I crossed the border on foot at Scobey six months after the general amnesty, and two weeks after Dad passed on, no brass bands were playing-but it was a well-known fact that even the actual vets didn't get parades. It was a typical eastern Montana March day-wind that had took a running start at…

Doc

Doc Kitchens told me about this trapper he took the appendix out of name Robb Valton the one got his finger cut off but he found it put it in his pocket when he got home sewed it back on the stump part didn't work fell off after a week so he buried it but…