It must have been you whipping the sheets like sails in my face, when I ran between the rows of wet wash. You brushed my neck when I was yanked by a skirt hem from under a speeding truck the year I was five. You are the one I left a warm bed for when…
Once upon a time, the chief business of the good literary magazines was discovery, the seeking and finding of new and gifted writers. They were discovered, and then they moved on to other stages and places. Old world has changed a whole lot since then. For at least twenty years the good literary magazines have…
It was Rob Baxter's guard dog again. Maddy laid her arm over her scratchy eyes and wondered who the mutt was after tonight. It felt too early for the paper boy, too late for some man strolling with his girlfriend. When the barking didn't stop, Maddy threw back covers and got out of bed. Charlie…
When I was seven and first learned about sex in the tool shed out behind Aunt Pauline's house, Bobby Joe and I stood facing each other trying to fuck because his older brother and my older sister had told us to. In a shade tree outside cicadas droned. A car drove up the road. And…
The stone walls had lost the stone life of Under-earth, and, against the air, set their mouths in a jagged seam. The sky gave no rich press of the pores of life, no movement like the womb's stirrings of a vein, a root, a worm. In this world of the exposed skull, rain was simply…
Lucky indeed is the young writer who has a background like Josip Novaikovich. No shortage of something to write about. Listen. He grew up in Yugoslavia, the son of a clog-maker in a mountain town. Matters got complicated, seeing that his family was of a small group of Baptists in a Communist country that was…
From the beginning, Marshall Klimasewiski has instinctively known the point where a story or an anecdote becomes fiction. His earliest efforts, when he had just enrolled as a Creative Writing major here at Carnegie Mellon, already had that center to them, that crossing of emotions which distinguishes a genuine short story, even though these efforts…
Reading about how in mythologies god came down in a shower of gold or some such immaculate way to mate with mortals, I think of how my daughter Angel came to be conceived in the front seat of an old '56 Lincoln after bar-closing time. And of how, with panties in my pocket, an unhooked…
The receiver is back in its cradle. Against the windows of this house my brother has never visited, and never will visit, a light rain begins to fall. Why do we persist in honoring the tragic? the outsized? the doomed?—when it's what is small and diminishing that defeats us: that is us. You know, I…
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