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STORIES
Sea Legs : : qu.ee/r Magazine Julie and I listen to the donkey's one-sided conversation for a long time before it stops. We yawn in tandem, as though these animal sounds have carried a magic spell on the wind. Julie turns in and folds herself into her sleeping bag. I stay up only long enough to cover our tracks, cramming our plastic cups below other trash and hiding the cork. The bottle I hurl into the lake. I throw it pretty far, its splash muted and quaint, but I find myself afraid it won't sink right away, that it will bob its way back to us and knock at the boat until everyone's awake. So I lie like this, for what seems like forever, thinking about the donkey, about my brother, about Julie and her strong legs, her perfect hairless neck, about Owen's lips parting for mine, and I wait for the wine bottle. I listen for all the sounds that refuse to come. : : Read full story Just How I Left You : : Plenitude Magazine Vibrating over these steel bridge grates never fails to remind me of you. Here is the stench of your Marlboros, the acrid smell of burnt sugar in the coffee I’m stuck holding for you because Marge always spills it. Here is Marge and I stifling a case of the giggles each of the Sunday mornings you drove us to Chinatown for dim sum and fake purse shopping, using us to impress a long line of sad women. Riding the Manhattan Bridge is like riding perfection, something hoisted and sustained by wire, stone and steel, by thousands of ironworkers and engineers, but our trips across it are always too brief. : : Read full story Hiccup's Bluff : : Rougarou The saloon sat firmly in the center of Canyon Crossing, a town of three avenues and seven streets that crisscrossed each other with remedial simplicity before their limbs stretched out in all directions to farm homes, factories, and the jagged creek running slow and turbid to Palo Duro. Placing wagers with the old-timers as to which had appeared first, the Mitchells or the saloon, was never advised. It was a trick question. The dual rows of brick facades along Second went up in ’24, and it was this construction, spotted across the scarred plain, that first attracted the pioneer Mitchells to canyon country. The town, its mortar, and all those bastard Mitchells hardened together. : : Read full story Go Time : : Currently submitting : : Read excerpt The Delaware Gap : : Currently submitting : : Read excerpt OTHER Introduction to the Summer 2011 Anthology Moving or Still, published by Write Around Portland |