Black on White
Brian Howell
Karen and I have come back here to correct an error from that first occasion, of which there is no record, except the brittle one of memory. I can remember her look of disappointment, not anger, the expression that said, This makes me unhappy.
Caving
Stephen F. Anderson
“Tell me one thing,” Maisie blurts. “If you could know all you know now, say, when you were fifteen and listening to obscure new-wave bands or whatever you do in the suburbs, daydreaming about hanging yourself, would you have, I don’t know, gone out for sports instead?”
Sixteen Roads to El Dorado
Michael Behrens
I was waiting for a bus when the old man told me he knew the way to El Dorado.
Where to Go
David McGrath
DuPree did not feel a need to take his gun, which he left on the kitchen table. After all, he was just going for a walk.
The moment he could have
David Alexander McFarland
For no reason he could later remember he looked up when an anonymous girl passed through his field of vision; she looked familiar, too much so, but he could not place her in the panorama of girls he knew who were somewhere near his daughter’s age
David Hockney re Edouard Manet …
Anna Sidak
I’ve a silly little question about the pool but it can wait until later. I’m starting the interview with a question regarding an 1863 Edouard Manet painting in which two fully clothed young men lounge on the grass in the company of a naked woman.
The Tour Must Continue
Robert Castle
What had possessed him to suppress Tricia’s presence? He had begun the journal before he had noticed her, although she, and not Mrs. Hill, had sat beside him on the plane and was writing in a diary. He was making fun of Tricia then, not literally, but with the types of mundane comments she was writing. If he wasn’t looking for trouble, why would he have not been honest about it?
The Crown Upon His Head
Steven Gillis
My father, Aaron Pitchmore, once swam the length of Lake Katobi—a distance of nearly one mile—stripped down to his boxers, in late fall when the water had chilled and all the catamarans, sunfish and canoes were docked for winter.
La Chanson Du Chien
Pietro Aman
Watching the late flowers below
shatter themselves upon themselves,
the woman in the loft casement
shifts to straighten her neck
Pierre-Auguste
Pietro Aman
I too would have sought
the love of such girls. And he is dead, the artist, anyway.
The girls of his terrace day are likewise gone
The Moth Maiden
Arlene Ang
Grabbing a fuchsia robe, I found Aunt Matilda
before the stove, her eyes mesmerized
by the fire circles she had ignited.
Yesterday was blue, like smoke
Arlene Ang
I let her smoke another cigarette.
Like a henchwoman in white, I shiver
from the cold.
Dead Relatives
Ja’net Daniello
Over the washing machine’s hum
or the hollow drip
of the kitchen faucet, I hear them
knock at the door.
Leaving
Ja’net Daniello
As he stands in the living room,
no bags in hand, my grandmother wonders
what she’ll do with his things
The Professor and Philosopher …
D.E. Fredd
You will no doubt swoon, suffer the vapours and be indisposed to receive guests as did Trollope.
And, whatever our fate, it will surely converge upon us like Hardy’s iceberg, inexorably.
A UFO Spotted Low …
D.E. Fredd
Doctors say she is as good as can be expected
Considering
So now that they know what our women are like
We can expect any number of them
Against Ambition
Mark Jackley
I’d rather be a tree nodding
at the caravan, filled with crickets
chanting, We belong—the old advice
