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  • Double Zero

    First I was 76. We had been assigned numbers to be taped on our helmets, front and back, with masking tape. But on the first morning I lost my number. A cadre member walked down each long file of men, standing in front of one, then the next, then the next, down the line. This…

  • Directions

    Here are the directions by which You, like the others, should find me. When you come to the central square You will find a statue jump up Like a shout that ends in the point Of his finger. Turn your back And walk downhill. Pass the beggar At the towngate, but give him nothing. He’s…

  • Subway

    I am sorry, she would say. That’s all right, I would murmur. She stood with her back towards me, my nose nearly touching. The train lurched to the right, giving me the space to breathe in freely, and I waited for the swing back when I would have to lift her from my chest, with…

  • Psalm

    In the car, his immense and hairless hands melding with the steering wheel, David accelerated into the bank of the curve, weight shifting, the outside wheels lifting, giddying him for a moment with gravity's loss, caught as if in a morning dream of flight, his fear giving way to intimations of immortality; not an idea…

  • Exile’s Return

    We came off the Ozarks at night, Dreaming the motels we stayed in, Skirted the snow and parked On the edge of the Grand Canyon. Now, it is the tinder of border towns, Greened ruins, locked headlands, Cow-guilted fields and scattered squalls Scouting for winter. Honey thins Out of the blood. At four o’clock The…

  • The Sayings of Mr. Purple

    None of his friends could say what made Purple tick. He had an observable routine, the same as a number of others from the British colony in this Costa Del Sol fishing village cum retirement-tourist village: coffee and red wine to wake up in the morning (1 or 2 in the afternoon) at the Calle…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue DeWitt Henry CONTRIBUTORS DAVID BOSWORTH lives in Cambridge. His short fiction has appeared in The Ohio Review, The Antioch Review and The Agni Review, and his non-fiction in The Antioch Review. He has been awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship for 1979-80. R. V….

  • The Well Dreams

    The well dreams; liquid bubbles. Or it stirs as a water spider skitters across; a skinny legged dancer. Sometimes, a gross interruption: a stone plumps in. That takes a while to absorb, to digest, much groaning and commotion in the well’s stomach before it can proffer again a nearly sleek surface. Even a pebble can…