Mud Season Review
Healing Waters
By Melissa Wiley
A tornado’s hurried intake of breath uprooted a pine tree in my parents’ garden, my mom calls to tell me earlier on a Sunday morning than I need to hear it. What would they have done if it hit the house while they were sleeping? she asks…
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Garbage Heap Wonderland
By Gretchen Comcowich
We pass the last neighborhood before the forest begins. We walk beyond the houses where mountain-hardened residents are tucked away. As we crunch through old snow, the barking dogs and sounds of ATVs fade….
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Mapquest to Auntie Iryne’s
By Lori White
Leaving From:
FURMAN AVE, VENTURA, CA 93003
Pack the following:
– Water to silence your mother’s nagging cough
– The only dress you own and a pair of sandals to solve any wardrobe objections your father may have (you can change in the back seat)
– KLEENEX!!!!!!!
Sap Rising: A Natural History of Neighborhood
By Arthur Plotnik
Like old homesteaders circling their spread and recalling the early days, we often walk the forty steps of our cherished one-tenth-acre plot reflecting on when we settled in an unsettling Chicago neighborhood some three decades ago. We didn’t face locusts, dust storms, or massacres (though one murder took place around the corner)….
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Where It Ends
By Elizabeth Gaucher
The wider and darker the bruise, the greater was the evidence of our commitment. In hindsight, that was a pretty unsettling attitude for a couple of twelve-year-old girls to have about their favorite pastime. Sandy and I invented “tennis basketball” one summer in the early 1980s, ostensibly just to occupy our bored selves…
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Knit to Feelings
By Megan Bush
Tell me about yourself, humans ask. We query friends, family, lovers; in supermarket parking lots, at dinner tables, in bars, in bedrooms. Over time, the answers become threads woven into cloth. The stories wrap us together, like children pressed against their mothers’ chests, like naked lovers held between one set of sheets…
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Whacking a Doe
By Alexander Barbolish
It took three shots to kill my first deer. The first bullet hit at the base of her lungs and exited out the left shoulder. With awkward, halting leaps, the doe bounded forward about twenty yards and then stopped. I rose from the weeds along the tree line and walked out into the field, focusing on the dark hole in the middle of her side.
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The Bees Are All Women
By Millie Tullis
My naked back is still open to the winter air, and I know Jaden can see its white glow even in the dark as we talk. I feel cold sitting up in the bed. I hold the heavy comforter to my neck and chest and bury my face in it when he speaks. “I think…it should wait…until marriage,” he says…
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The Grey House Didn’t Speak
by Rain Wright
No people remain to lift their hands in farewell. Home does not speak. It does not call out our names as we move up the steps onto the plane. It does not call out as if to say We have a long history, do not go…
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Bookbinding for Amateurs in Autumn
by Tara Deal
The creaking space is filled with what looks like torture equipment: guillotines, paper cutters, iron presses, hammers, and chisels. This is not a place for hobbyists, and I am grateful. Because I want to learn how to do something difficult….
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with light steam
by Alex Simand
A few years ago I began frequenting a Russian bathhouse in San Francisco, a city far from my childhood home of Toronto, far from my pot-bellied uncles and drunken cousins, and Russian curse words. The bathhouse is called Archimedes Banya, and it does not market itself as a Russian bathhouse…
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Like Happy Birthday But Not Really
by Edmund Sandoval
This year your birthday falls in the weeks between the day when she calls you at work to tell you between sobs that they found something in her brain and the day she meets with the neurosurgeon for the final diagnosis. They is a radiologist whose name we never learn but who, after looking at the MRI scan of her brain, says there’s a lesion right in the middle of it. In the Turkish Chair…
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Throwing Stones at Apple Trees
by John Messick
Along the limestone southern coast of Turkey in the port city of Mersin, tucked amid Roman ruins, fields of iambic columns, and newly built high-rises, I spent three days in a back-alley whorehouse. The sign in front of the building was small, barely visible. “Otel,” it read. Old men sat sipping tea in the lobby…Read more
Shelter
by Sarah Marty-Schlipf
On that warm June afternoon when I first laid eyes on Bently, I’d been on my way to teach a writing class at the county jail. I knew our local no-kill shelter taught inmates at the nearby federal prison to train dogs. Because I was early for work, I stopped in to see the place I’d heard so much about…Read more
The Origins of Minor Injuries
by Dinh Prince
Dozens of nights play out in this way: Benjamin twisting out of our arms again and again, arching his back, rolling his eyes, his muscles hardening as he struggles away from our grasp. A baby can be enormously strong, its power centered in the stomach under misleading layers of fat…Read more
An Unexpected Light
by Shuly Cawood
Sometimes I wish we could start over—not so we could change it, but to do it all again. I would rewind the clock eight years to that Saturday night contra dance, after I had escaped the crowds to cry in the back hallway of the Carrboro Century Center. Tsafi hardly knew me, but she followed me anyway…Read more
A Month in a Far Country
by Timothy Kenny
It takes about 10 days of teaching before I realize the chaos of Baku’s streets has decamped to my classroom. Our accents have begun to make sense to each other: the pronunciations less confusing, the awkward syntax mentally transposed. But asking a question…Read more
The Swim Lesson
by R.A. Lev
It’s freezing. He’s freezing. My son’s lips are purple-blue. I wonder if this is still a good idea, if this was ever a good idea. There are other places we could have gone. Pools where the water temperature is kept at a balmy 86 degrees, where the floor is lowered slowly so he wouldn’t notice the gradual lift as his lungs fill with air…Read more
Here in the Museum of Things Gone Terribly Wrong
by Craig Reinbold
Setting: an outdoor bus terminal and the place is bustling. S—, a native of Mexico City, has been wearing the same reeking T-shirt for most of a week, and he strips it off now, reaching into a bag on the floor next to him for a clean pink polo, which he slips over his head. He loops a belt around his waist…Read more