Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken and it was this. Hang it head downwards, hold on to it, and go in with your knife. Slit the roof of the mouth and the upper part of the beak. Go for the veins that cross each other at the back of the throat. If…
Hannah was her usual reticent self on the subject. "I don't trust them," was all she'd say. Reticent and cryptic. "What the hell you mean you don't trust them?" Brian kept asking her. "Nothing. I just don't trust them. That's all." Brian was trying to find his sneakers. Hannah was no help on that score…
have one thing in common: they’re not Going to let a signal slip past unacknowledged, In scholarly journals, columns for letters From readers, TV/radio, public debates or similar media; And if a really good idea comes truckin’ along They’ll pull over, stop the car, and sit In some little roadside place with curbservice To let…
George Garrett wrote four volumes of short fiction along with about thirty uncollected pieces including “A Record As Long As Your Arm,” which appears in this issue of Ploughshares. He had his share of praise along the way, but not as much as his short fiction warranted. In a very real way, he was a story-teller…
J. O. BEALE J. O. Beale is a horse's ass which anyone can see he smells like something in the grass I couldn't finish the thought because I couldn't find the rhyme, though I wrote seven or eight rhyming words in the margin: free, sea, be, tree, me. Even Don key. None of them…
(later acquitted of the drowning) There was the pond, trout-filled, dark green. Child-shaped for the father since the child was born. But deeper. There was the sour brown meadow, the blue jays moving against his ears. The father walked through, lonelier than anyone. There was the huge doll-son he carried, breathing heavy in his arms….
Ray, old buddy, one of the things I'll never be able to forget is the look on your face when you strolled into your bedroom and discovered me there with your wife. You were supposed to be away for the whole weekend with the Debate Team. Only they called it off, and so you got…
I want to tell you about the undoing of a man. I did not know him very well. It is only the conditions that led directly to his collapse that I know well enough, the handful of episodes that seem to me pertinent. I in fact was present at the critical moment – when matters…
You walk into the orchard: peaches flop in the globe of shifting green Here is the sister who left you, her hair a rowdy auburn against the fluid summer You are the hustlers of peaches You ring the peaches down, down like churchbells In the faraway Idaho town, the parishioners do not hear you You…
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