A constable walked up and down on the pavement below the open windows. Inside, the party of eight had finished dinner and sat drinking brandy by the windows over-looking the Park. Someone in the room suggested that they each tell the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to them. The hostess spoke first, while…
Take up your cross and don't cross me. I just xeroxed my hand, veins, bones and all. See, it's blue now, my doctor says, because the sky, by mistake, mirage or otherwise, he says, is the color, arteries, of the sun's eyes. Take up your cross and follow (why me?) to the Flannery Theater. Redshift…
1. Crazy? It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed: No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and work boots and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard. I pick a spot near the toolshed. Crazy, you think? Maybe, maybe not, but listen. This is the hour of…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Raymond Carver Managing Editor Susannah Lee CONTRIBUTORS Max Apple is the author of The Oranging of America (1976), Zip (1978). Free Agents will be published by Harper & Row in May 1984. He teaches at Rice University, Houston. Jamie Diamond lives in Santa Monica,…
Andrew Lytle, who has recently attained his eightieth birthday, is one of the most original and significant figures in Southern letters. To those who know him and his work, such a statement is a truism; but Lytle's writing is not so widely known, nor his place in the region's literary history so secure, that his…
There was a park at the bottom of the hill. Now that the leaves were down Marty could see the exercise stations and part of a tennis court from her kitchen window, through a web of black branches. She took another donut from the box on the table and ate it slowly, watching the people…
The last time I edited Ploughshares I knew all the contributors personally and solicited work from them. This time, the opposite is almost literally true: I deliberately set myself the task of confronting what came unsolicited to the magazine and was more on the lookout for work that promised than for names that clicked. Of…
He and his companion had escaped the streets of War for the day, and he followed the older boy by several yards. They had made the deciduous woodland, accompanied by the Kentucky and worm-eating warblers, and had come to the spruce-fir line. Somewhere from its domed ground nest an ovenbird passed itself off as a…
In my family, there were always two people. First, my mother and father. Carol and John. They danced. Hundreds of evenings at hundreds of parties in their twenties. A thousand times between songs her eyes completely closed when she leaned against him. He looked down at the top of her head; her part gleamed white,…
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