MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue James Randall Fiction Editors DeWitt Henry Tim O'Brien Associate Fiction Editor David Gullette CONTRIBUTORS M.M. ANDERSON is a discovery of Tim O'Brien's. She currently lives in Texas. JOHN ASHBERY'S current book is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which won both the National Book Award…
It is late afternoon, the Sunday before Labor Day. Paul looks over the classroom assigned to him and then goes outside, down the steps into summer heat and sun. In the middle of the dusty street, a girl with long legs leans into a car, talking with the driver. She balances on tiptoe and her…
On this pavement I have fallen without grace, and I am looking into the eyes of a handsome blue stranger, who will not let me rise. He says an ambulance is coming. I may have broken a bone. But he is lying, and he knows that I can rise if I desire. This lady claims…
Welcome to our show How Funny Can You Get. Without saying or doing anything contestants must appear so clearly we can’t help laughing. Sit down, no jokes or lettuce tuxedos tolerated. Be yourself here. Don’t smile. When you think in an objective sense you are funny enough raise the right hand. If we laugh then,…
I was going round Manhattan . . . and I noticed a girl sitting all by herself on the other side of the deck – a girl of about thirty, wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, `I…
for S.H. Not once in forty years have I gone without a meal or slept without a roof over my head. I’ve known less deprivation than anyone I know. My father died two months before I was born, it is true, and my daughter passed away before she ever spoke a word. But it’s hard…
I was middle-aged before I learned not even place is constant. Moths surrender flight each morning, like the huge ones we found dead against the screen. Madmen even cage the kling-kling bird. Places drift. Where had everything gone? Boulder, mountain, meadow, beach wore time’s integument like mist. Poinciana blurred. Palms, once a silhouette of summer,…
If you were to go there alone you would find whole branches rising by themselves from the floor . . . You would see leaves and pine needles leap off into the still air, and return. There are animals in that forest without voices. Songs drifting through, like fog. Slowly you would notice the trees…
I open the door to the last century and they are there, the only two men I ever loved, sitting at a table, playing cribbage, puffing on their pipes. I enter the room expecting them to rise, but they do not; one says he is preoccupied with nothing, the other does not speak at all….
Spring 1997