By: Joel Augee – Posted: December 6, 2010
Berto’s earliest memory was not of a vision but a smell. It came from under the door of the room that he was forbidden to enter. He’d been playing a game with sticks and pebbles on the floor – war, against the Austrians – while his mother simultaneously nursed the newborn and rode verbal and physical herd over his younger brother and sister. The older brothers were outside working the vineyard with his father and the older sisters were for the moment out of the kitchen and on various errands of some sort.
He was oblivious to the domestic commotion around him. He put his head down against the stone floor and sighted an imaginary rifle. “Fump!” Down went an Austrian. Then “fump-fump-fump!” More white-coats fell. “Move ahead!” he commanded. Then in another voice: “Retreat! Retreat! Over the mountains and behind these trees.” His eyes scanned the battlefield with minute intensity while his arm and hand, descending from the sky, orchestrated troop movements.
By: Robert Epstein – Posted: November 18, 2010
I followed the Metal Men. I watched them load baskets of fish, meat, water, and charcoal, and finally the enormous carved pole into their steel boat. I stood on the beach as they rowed out to their silent, looming vessel, the leader clinging to the pole and barking orders to the others. And in the gathering darkness, I longed to join them. Something had changed in me. With a kind of metallic click, I found myself snipped off from my people. At the moment that the strange chief unhooked the contraption from its chain, I understood that it was not his heart, and that he was just a man with wondrous objects. The other Trojans saw this, too, but for them, it was the magic of the objects that mattered. The visitor’s watch was a talisman for them. For me, it became a compass. It pointed to a universe of technology and industry, of science and time. These things were out there somewhere, over the waters, and I wanted to go there.
By: Nicole Reid – Posted: November 15, 2010
I was eight when Perry Cole moved into Blacksburg. She was special ed. She was tall with string for hair, and no one even saw her. All the special ed kids were invisible, except when they weren’t and we’d snicker and watch our boys toss paper at them, make kissing faces at the skittish girls. She wasn’t dumb, not even slow. Perry was quiet, silent really. She never answered her teachers before coming to our town—at least that’s what I figure now because I’ve talked to her. I don’t mean to say that I was her friend, but just that I knew maybe a bit of her.
By: Tara Laskowski – Posted: November 10, 2010
The boy’s body hit the hood of the Toyota, slammed off the windshield, and then slid, falling out of sight from where Marie stood. She thought it might have been a performance, it happened so quickly, but there was no mistaking the terrible, high-whistle screeching of hot rubber on asphalt, the dull thud as the kid’s body hit the street. His bike crumpled under the front wheels as though it was fake, made of foil. People flooded the street, retail workers from the stores, good Samaritans pulling over in their cars to help, but Marie was frozen, waiting for someone to tell her it was just a joke.
By: Claire Cox – Posted: November 2, 2010
He remembered her long nose. A Meryl Streep nose: it bisected her face on the vertical axis, while her high cheekbones and eyebrows did the same on the horizontal. When they were sleeping together, he had wanted to crack open her deadpan disinterest, to find the smoldering he knew was underneath. He never found it. Their affair had dissipated like smoke.
By: Sarah Martin Byrd – Posted: September 24, 2010
“Where are we going?” twelve-year-old Sadie Madison asked her mama. “We’ve been driving for two days now. You said it would take two days. Aren’t we about there?”
Millie Madison looked over at her headstrong oldest child, and then peeked at the curled up form of Sammy, her five-year old son, lying in the back seat. Overwhelming love stirred inside her and hot tears threatened to flow down her cheeks. She couldn’t let Sadie see any of the emotion she held deep inside her: fear, pain, and worst of all the uncertainty. Millie felt the place where the growth was removed from the back of her neck. Every time she turned her head, the grinding of scar tissue vibrated through her ears. How long would it take? Two months, two years? No one could tell her exactly when. They were just sure it would eventually sprout new growth just like a seed potato, the new taking over and the old left to rot away.
By: Midge Raymond – Posted: July 15, 2010
The ferry pulled into the harbor at dawn, and they watched the sun rise behind the cliffs. The craggy bluffs of Santorini towered over them, exposing layers of black, white, and gray earth, all streaked with dark red, as if sprinkled with powdered blood.
She outlined the harbor with her eyes. When he told her he would bring her here, she bought a book about the island. So she knew, as she looked out at the sea, that the island used to be round, that she was not overlooking a body of water but a submerged volcanic crater, flooded centuries ago by a catastrophic eruption.
By: Tony Press – Posted: July 8, 2010
“Elvis died on my birthday. My fourteenth. We lived in Delavan then. My mom worked at the club on the lake.”
Stirring wretched coffee with a fork while a tinny radio played something that must have been relevant to the assertion, fifty-seven year old Alonzo Johnson wondered how it had been decided, at that moment, in a packed Greyhound diner, that the stranger sharing his two-person table would disclose that particular piece of information. Or, more properly, those pieces, as it wasn’t only the Elvis-death-birthday declaration, but there was also Delavan, the mom, and the club. That must have been Hugh Hefner’s old place on Lake Geneva. He wondered which was most pertinent.
By: Sarah Martin Byrd – Posted: June 11, 2010
The first year after Henry’s death, the Blackwells cleared the hilly land. By the next spring, a half-dozen acres were ready to plant. On a frosty March morning, Mary headed to Harrisonburg. In her right pants pocket was ninety-two dollars folded over with twine into a tight, thick wad. She could feel its weight on her thigh, but she reached into her pocket just to feel it, to touch it and make sure it was still there. This was her and Henry’s life savings, and most of it would be spent that day on those little black specks of gold called burley seed. The future of the Blackwell family depended upon seeds.
By: Kate LaDew – Posted: March 29, 2010
The boy’s skin was very pale. Arms turned down, thin strips of black wrapped around, mapping where the skin didn’t meet. He was very handsome and Murmur was glad.