Article

The Fox

From where she was sitting at the kitchen table, her hands deep in the ball of dough in a green bowl, she could see him cross the creek beyond the lower pasture and angle up toward the house. He stopped to lean on the fence that bordered the remains of the summer garden, where the…

River Day

There are four of them: Rick and MaryAnn, Molly and Molly's father, MaryAnn's ex. His name is Art. He is a gangly man with a reddish beard and a face that is slightly off kilter. Even on the river he smokes constantly and flicks the butts of his cigarettes into the brown, swift water. They…

After the Storm, August

What can I learn from the hummingbird, a big thing like me? I hardly have time to study its flash, its momentous iridescence, before it disappears into the mimosa, sated with nectar. I admire the way the greenery trembles. I remember reading that this bird is never sated—its whole miniature life an exercise in digestion….

On Cathy Carr

Born in Nebraska, Cathy Carr has lived in North Carolina all through the 1980's. She took her undergraduate degree at Duke University and lists the writer-in-residence there, Mr. Reynolds Price, as a major influence on her thought and writing. She is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at the University of North…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue George Garrett Assistant Director / Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Associate Fiction Editor / Office Manager Don Lee Thanks this issue to: Mariette Lippo, Robert Soorian and our interns Richard Chetwynd, Bonnie Greenberg, Penny Kline, Nadia Sahely and Cathy Willmott. CONTRIBUTORS Madison Smartt Bell is…

You Are the Distance

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…

Introduction

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…

Claire de la Lune

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…