There have been a blessed many animals with whom I have shared this house, this life of poetry and art, this dream of living gods and walking visions. Many things have scratched, stretched, and slept in the places where the sun brings warmth and light to the slats of hard, blond wood that floor my [...]
Fiction
Paros
David SolwayTravel is no longer the pleasure it once was, especially on Aegean boats, even if one is looking forward to visiting the Blue Island of Paros. On the Limnos today the decks were so crowded that at times it was almost impossible to move. The greatest source of danger is the perpetual buffeting proximity of [...]
Problem in the Hamburger Room
Laura Boudreau1. The Hamburger
There is nothing in the first room until we get there and that is why we love it.
“This is not a gallery. It’s a hallway,” the guide says. We are both sympathetic towards the guide, who wears trousers one inch too short for her long and spindly legs. Such a trouser-wearer cannot be [...]
The Number Three
Alexander MacLeodFrom Light Lifting.
The single fried egg might be life’s loneliest meal. He listens to the sizzle of unfertilized yolk and waits another second before lifting away from the heat. The timing is important. He wants the skin starting to harden but everything else still shaky and runny inside. It quivers on his spatula before sliding [...]
The Daybook of Yasser Sagherie
Marius KociejowskiIt used to be said of the Souq al-Arawam that business there was so tough whenever Satan walked through it he’d roll up his trouser legs so as not to get them soiled. If you met a girl and fancied her, it was best to tell a white lie and say your shop was just [...]
Sweet
Rebecca RosenblumSyl had put up pictures of Brian in every room in the house – she had the ones Evan and Angie emailed printed at Blacks because she wanted the baby around all the time, as if he lived in their house instead of so far away. The snapshot in the kitchen was from the boy’s [...]
Serenissima
Ray SmithSerene was she as she stepped from the foam of her bath onto the sea shell patterned tiles, but then Gwen felt again the switch in her side which she took as a threat, a foreboding. Something was going wrong, something subtle and complex, beyond the skills of doctors.
What fools men are, with their logic [...]
In Her Prime
Clark BlaiseTiffy Hu and I are passing by the hedges behind the tennis courts, headed to skating practice, when a horrible truth strikes me: life is eternal. There’s no escaping it, not even in death. I’m scuffling my shoes over the concrete slabs, over tufts of grass and weeds and the anthills and dried snail shells. Dogs do their business under the hedges. Flies drop their eggs. Smudgy little birds perch on the fence and hop through the thorny branches.
“You coming, Prammy?”
“I’m thinking,” I say. What goes on in her little brain? It must be like the birds, hopping and chirping. Actually, I do know. It’s sex, sex, sex.
The Words
Rebecca RosenblumColleen
Colleen shuffled the God pamphlets in her lap while Mr. Andrews chalked square yellow letters on the board. Boring. The white-paper one was cheaply printed: the yellows did not line up with the reds or blues, so Jesus was all halo, no body. Inside was just a boring list of Sunday school and Bible-study classes. [...]