Here we go… December 15th. Today is the last day for the Literary Awards Program. All postal entries must be postmarked with today’s date. For online entries, I’ll be taking down the forms tomorrow… So you’ve got all day, no matter where you are. No worries there. Any problems or last minute questions – shoot me an [...]
The Journal
These Days
It was cool for that time of year, tolerable. The night was hidden by a hazy mist that clung to the van’s windshield. Larry almost didn’t see the kid until he was upon him—a ghost on the side of the road, neither coming nor going. Larry passed him—no hitchhikers, ever. Too dangerous these days. Maybe once, when he himself was a kid, but not now, not after Nixon, after Oklahoma City and Osama bin Laden. He’d spent over a decade on the road, one of the last hardy traveling salesmen, a dying breed he called himself, and he’d survived as long as he had because he didn’t pick up hitchhikers. Common sense kept you alive.
But a habitual glance in the rearview mirror caused him to pull over. Something about the slump of the figure’s shoulders suggested youth.
Corrales
Corrales, New Mexico is a narrow, meandering patchwork of a village lying low in the Rio Grande Valley. It consists of horse paddocks, orchards, skinny vegetable gardens, slightly jarring retail strips and ancient adobe buildings jammed into the space between the river bosque and the mesas to the West. Its citizens are a mix of artists, craftsmen, farmers, shop keepers and upscale business types longing to find an escape. Tall, spreading forms of gnarly old Cottonwood trees seem to stand guard and protect the village from the incursion of too much reality.
A lack of such incursions led us, a few years back, into the New Mexican Handmade Furniture business and meeting Mike. We’d heard he made tortilla tables and wanted to see one.
Light Lifting: A Review
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod is anything but light. In a collection of seven short stories, his characters face the physical reality of life, death, illness, and exhaustion. They are fighters, they are bricklayers, they are swimmers struggling for life against the Nova Scotia tide. MacLeod structures the majority of his stories with a tight [...]
What Boys Like: A Review
Kurt Cobain once said: I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not. In her short story collection What Boys Like, Amy Jones illustrates many characters who, in these fifteen brilliantly well-crafted tales, much like Cobain, revel in their own uniqueness of who they are, rather than who they are not. Jones takes great care to explore the tenuous, callous and often humorous boundaries of human relationships, while maintaining one consistent theme, it seems: everyone has something to lose.
Stateside: A Review
Recently, I have been trying to understand how women, as lovers, observers, as teachers and veterans, mothers and wives, and especially as female poets, understand and feel about war in all its many forms. Jehanne Dubrow, in her third poetry collection, Stateside, addresses a sub-culture often without recognition: the women waiting at home for the men who are deployed overseas. Her collection digs into the emotional wax and wan that can build, distress, destroy, or strengthen, both a woman and her marriage.
Keepsake
Coming off the ice at the lonely end of the Rapid Tucker’s Pond, his feet starting to numb in earnest, the new snow like razor blades on his face, Bannock “Brace” Bannon was compelled to look behind him, across the pond closing down fast in white fury. Earlier he had seen the girl in the comely figure swing around the edge of the pond, admiring her ease, her grace on the blades, her hair at times flying out as straight as a windy pennant.
One impulse hit him that she was a stranger, not because he hadn’t seen her before, but because she was perilously close to the channel between the two islands of Rapid Tucker’s Pond. In the ten years he had been here at the far end of the pond, a loner in an old cabin that took an endless amount of maintenance, the channel had been frozen only once, and that back in his first year, the worst year of all. Was all that decision time and tempest here again, coming down on top of him anew?
Honest as a Sister Can Be
“We lived under this same roof but your mom was raised by wolves. We always knew that door from opposite sides.” Aunt Rosie performed a dual role regarding my mom, as both chief celebrant and royal accuser. Thanksgivings came more frequently every year, so it seemed, and it was with particular relish that my aunt served the prom night story. It was a tradition she made new each November, her eyes flashing, her voice rising and falling along a musical scale only she knew. Even her hands and arms played their parts, their instincts honed by well-orchestrated stage directions.
The Last Hour of the Day
Holton had come a long way from the city. He hadn’t seen another person for three days. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt at ease in his surroundings. He sat down on a riverbank underneath a tree and looked at the sky. The clouds had lifted and the sunlight glinted in gold on the water. There was still beauty in the world.
He took a tiny sip of water from the canteen. He didn’t have much left and he knew he was going to have to get more, and soon. He could go for a long time without food but water was a different matter. He would never get thirsty enough to drink from the river. If drinking from the river didn’t kill him, it could make him sick enough that he might never recover.
Spirit Theft
Tacánecy tenses as she waits to begin her next count. The lightning is closer now, and she readies herself for a silent and measured five. She prays her sleeping husband will not hear the sound she is about to make.
Despite herself, she jumps when a piercing flash lances through the window in the opposite wall and, in a spasm of blue-white light, illuminates her husband’s Hawken rifle hanging on the wall beside her. It flickers lethally for a moment before the room goes black again.
One. Two. Three. Four. Her grip tightens on the soft doeskin shroud on the floor at her feet.
Five. On cue, the thunderclap vibrates through the soles of her moccasins and rattles a china cup against its shelf-mate. Its roar masks the whisper of leather against wood as she drags the bundle a few steps closer to the cabin door.