Article

Company

Every day did not start with Vince awake that early, dressing in the dark, moving with whispery sounds down the stairs and through the kitchen, out into the autumn morning while ground-fog lay on the milkweed burst open and the stumps of harvested corn. But enough of them did. I went to the bedroom window…

Snow Geese

"`The loss of clothing,'" Grent reads, "`implies free fall.'" I write this down. He pauses, scanning the page. "`In this general area a thumb was found hanging on a twig.'" I write this down. "`Whom we felt conclusively to be a member of the crew because the tissue was intimately associated with the control panel.'"…

the rabbits

it didn’t take long for papa to find his place. he sat down on the coffee table and pulled out his matches. the first one lit easily so he put it on the floor between his feet and the flame sandwich ate him up. mama came in screaming and running about like my rabbits in…

Static Discharge

The things it never does any good to protest. With our only son, Billy Frank, Jr., in a Mexican jail for having been intercepted with something illegal strapped to his leg. With daughter Mary Jo making daily visits to the shot-doctor for “vitamins,” leaving her probably autistic child in a playpen fitted with baubles and…

Discovery Section Introduction

The following pages constitute a discovery section in that the work is by writers who have not previously had a national appearance. To obtain their work I canvassed such teachers and writers as George Starbuck, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, and Tim O'Brien, and drew from my own students at Emerson College. We hope to repeat…

The Garden Wall

The air at the bottom of the garden was damp, but when Cecilia Lofton opened the gate, a gust of the chergui, loaded with needles of hot sand, struck her in the face. Raising her hand defensively, she squinted down the dusty road that meandered among scrubby palms and shacks of tin and cardboard until…

The Man at the Gate

He stood in the shadows as usual, as Charlotte had come to expect. He was a part, by now, of the quiet late afternoon street that gathered her in when the working day was over. It was dusk, early spring. The air was warmish, and as Charlotte rounded the corner she could smell the honeysuckle,…

The Hunting

Killing anything was pure accident. A dumb stalker, a worse shot—I went almost daily, to the woods. A favorite prey was slow and shallow: a brook. I’d say, as it moved languidly: Don’t move, you rascal! And when it did, of course, as it does, I’d shoot. I liked that: no wound, or at least…