Mud Season Review
Bugs
By Naomi Ulsted
I was watching television when my dad barreled into the living room in his boxers. He twisted and shimmied and slapped wildly at himself, his hands clapping sharply against his pale skin. My mother was at Grandma’s house…
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Blighted
By Elsa Valmidiano
Blight: NOUN 1. Any of numerous plant diseases resulting in sudden conspicuous wilting and dying of affected parts, especially young, growing tissues. 2. The condition or causative agent, such as a bacterium, fungus, or virus, that results in blight….
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Dark Bodies
By Abi Newhouse
Olivia and I drove through the canyon in the dark. The only light came unnatural and electric from street lamps or the car clock or the bright headlights behind us. I followed the road, the curve of it, and the hill, and did all of this with tears dripping down my face…
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Goodbye to All That
By Jordan Floyd
If Belle London were alive today, she’d be an intersectional feminist. She would frequent 25th Street in Ogden—where it all began, her Sin Alley, Two-Bit Street, the home of her once lucrative prostitution house…
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On Weaving
By Jericho Parms
Lately, in the middle of the night, I wake up in a tangle between the cat and my partner, whose chest rises and falls with his measured breath. I still use the word partner although it sounds like we are police officers or share leadership in a law firm…
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Gravity
By Meredith Boe
The planes over this city, they fly low. Above my bed, night or day, where I’ve spent my hours lately. The rush of vibrations gets louder, then softer, louder, then softer, like waves. When they’re really low, it sounds as if the sky is ripping in half. I go to work, read, drink too much, eat, make love. And repeat. Time feels wave-like, or more a whirlpool tub I can’t climb out of….
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![Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://mudseasonreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution_2.jpg)
Honeymoon Reservations
By Nancy McCabe
The first time I saw a slide of Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” projected on the screen in art history class, Marc and I had been married for nine months and I felt like I was viewing a metaphor for my own life….
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Bring Out Your Dead
By Rebecca Fremo
He repeats the lessons from yesterday: “Only aim at the target. Never touch the trigger til you’re ready to shoot the target. Never point it at people or up in the air. Animals could get hurt.” …
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Reservation
By Andrew Maynard
I’ve seen tumbleweed before, but never this massive. They look like clumps of wicker, like loosely bundled strands of barbwire, somersaulting viciously across the asphalt and shrinking into the shrub-covered desert. “Goddamn,” my father says, squinting out the passenger window of my truck. “They’re not even this big in Westerns….”
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The Funambulists
By Jonathan Rovner
Conjure up two people—let’s say one man and one woman—and place them in a nondescript room. Don’t slap them down like stamps in an album; people are fragile, after all. Fill the room with tension. The problem, of course, is that tension doesn’t look like anything. You might have to use your imagination. Maybe floodwaters are filling the room with a sluggish inevitability…
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A Song for the Beautifully Useful
By Barry Maxwell
I discovered the clock radio in an out-of-the-way niche of Granny’s living room, wedged on a bookshelf behind a ribboned bundle of last year’s Christmas cards and a stack of miniature New Testaments. It was an early ‘60s model, a minimalist white cube atop a round footing, designed to look space-age and modern, with no place in Granny’s poor-folk country décor….
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Cornucopia, Unincorporated
By Nancy Wyland
When I was younger, Dad often remarked about Cornucopia being “unincorporated,” as if this were a point of interest or amusement. I could tell it had something to do with the town’s size, but only after I looked up the word “unincorporated” did I realize the charming irony of a village proclaiming its independence within a town of 230 people…
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Knives
By Lauren Spinabelli
The author has requested that this essay be removed. We apologize for any inconvenience….
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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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