First Proof: Issue 107, Spring 2009

Bomb’s Literary Supplement

bill jacobson

Bill Jacobson portfolio Bill Jacobson’s recent photographic series is a quiet revolution. Its quietness is familiar, the care and concentration embedded in each photograph that holds us still and focused on his images. Yet the revolution starts on the surface—the works are square, sharp-focused, and flooded with saturated colors. This ambitious and expansive new project, titled A Series of Human Decisions, seems wholly unlike the pale, blurry portraits Jacobson is known for making.

In those earlier works details of the sitters were set aside in favor of the symbolic power of the anonymous body. The new images reveal spaces dense with descriptive detail.

In place of figures we have a variety of architectures, but the people are more present than ever.

The series offers a calm and focused look at our surroundings, loaded with catalysts for memory and thought. As much as individuals were chosen to pose for Jacobson’s camera in the past, human presence now seeps in through every corner of these not-so-empty scenes. The works meticulously frame sections of weathered building fronts, corners of art deco interiors, art studios crowded with discarded materials, curtained windows, and lonely objects patiently waiting for their time in the sun—potent details that point back to us and offer openings for lingering questions: What are those objects that we continue to carry with us from place to place? What are those colors that are sure to fill us with a rush of knowing emotion? What lies beneath the choice of that lamp that we always put next to that window? What is behind those closed blinds? What happened there, what is happening there, what will happen?

—Ian Berry

Bill Jacobson’s upcoming book, A Series of Human Decisions, to be published by Decode Books, will be available in October.

A Series of Human Decisions (#316), 1982/2008, chromogenic print, 30 × 28 inches. All images courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery.

bill jacobson

A Series of Human Decisions (#1748), 2005, chromogenic print, 30 Ă— 28 inches.

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contents

Ana Menéndez Traveling Fools 7 Rusty Morrison four Poems 10 Sally Anne Clegg You Are Your Own Very Unique Snowflake 12 J.R. Thelin Poetry Prize Winner: The Birds, BabySittin’ Boogie, Windows 13 Charles Mary Kubricht Portfolio: Slight Disturbances 17 Ben Ehrenreich Fiction for Driving across America: Everything You See Is Real 24 Laura Mullen Ghost Mist, with, Glitch 26 Michael Martone Dutch Boy 32-v 4

On the cover: Bill Jacobson, A Series of Human Decisions (#1120), 2004.

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This issue of First Proof is funded in part by the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation and the Thanksgiving Foundation.

Additional funding is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and readers like you.

bill jacobson

A Series of Human Decisions (#2550), 2008, chromogenic print, 30 Ă— 28 inches.

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Ana Menéndez

Ana Menéndez Traveling FOOLS All the men on my father’s side of the family have been mad in one way or another.

There was my great uncle Panchito, who joined the communist party in 1934, when it was a nothing party of dreamers, only to quit in 1965 when the party officially denied him permission to fly to the moon. He could have turned all those years of underground meetings and patriotic songs into something; he could have cashed in and finally helped his family. Instead, he spent the last years of his life writing angry letters to the Ministry for Travel and Culture, arguing that if the Russians could send a flea-bitten dog to space, certainly the Cubans ought to be able to send a loyal party monkey to the moon.

His latter letters were scrupulously ignored.

And he ended up dying in a rented room in his niece’s apartment, fighting her until the last for the right to his homemade rum. In the end, the party would not even allow him to be buried in the Patriot’s Cemetery.

There was a cousin named Severino who hanged himself from a banyan one spring morning after a passing traveler told him there was a buried treasure on the other side of the mountain. Severino, who’d never even traveled beyond the swamp. As a boy he’d been happy to sit out by a stream for hours and launch paper boats, waiting until one disappeared downstream before sending out the next one. The passing traveler was never seen or spoken of again until years later; miners discovered a silver vein hard against the mountain. The townspeople, in an act of remembering common to those times, named the mine after Severino.

And, most recently, there was my grandfather Solomon, who, as an exile in Miami, one cool winter morning began digging a tunnel beneath the azaleas with the intention of surfacing someday in Havana.

The first two stories have been passed down through the family and I can’t vouch for the truth in them. The last one I saw with my own eyes, and I can tell you that nothing can match the image of a shirtless old man with a dream. He had it all planned out, my 4

grandfather did, for he was a man who took great pride in logic and the scientific method. Before he even began to dig, he filled a great many notebooks with figures that explained precisely how many shovels of dirt it would take, how wide the hole should be, and how many years would have to pass before he finally broke through the sand on the other side. I was only eight years old then, but sometimes after school I helped him dig. My grandfather had barely made it under the property line when his project ended abruptly. It seems the neighbors had called the police to say the old man next door was digging what appeared to be a mass grave.

It took some days to sort out the complications that followed. But my grandfather never recovered from his disappointment. He sank into a deep sadness that didn’t lift even after my father, also prone to making mathematical calculations, pointed out a mistake in his figures and said that it actually would have taken 16,742 years to dig to Havana.

But perhaps the most tragically brilliant of this mad lineage was Matias Padron, a third great-cousin of my father’s through marriage by way of his mother. The family connection is tenuous, but I feel a certain pride in claiming Matias, for his story has passed into the island lore of Cuba; his story is the story of all of us. Matias, so it is told, was not a very big man. This is also true of most of the men on my father’s side of the family. But unlike most of the men, who tend to make up in width for what they lack in height, Matias was slightly built all around.

He was, it is well known, even smaller and thinner than his wife, who scandalously abused her advantage to keep Matias timid and soft-spoken at home. Matias didn’t seem to mind this and often played along goodnaturedly, now and then repeating a favorite phrase he had heard about the greatness of a man being measured not from the ground to his head, but from the distance of his head to God. The literal-minded took this to be an even greater disadvantage. But Matias knew what he was talking about.

Since he had turned 18, Matias had been running the post office in Santiago de Cuba.

By the time he was 40 years old, he had browsed 22 Christmas catalogs from El Encanto, leafed through dozens of Bohemias, and read several hundred letters of love, the great majority of which were not between husbands and wives. But the task that he adored above all the others was predicting

the weather. In those years, the postmaster also ran the local telegraph service. This meant that the postmaster, in addition to being the telegrapher, was also a sort of informal meteorologist, as the telegraph, for the first time in the Caribbean, was being used to give advance warnings of storms developing offshore. All previous postmasters had taken the duty very seriously. But none had thrown themselves into it with anything approaching the passion that Matias brought.

Matias and his wife lived above the post office in a house that, according to tradition, was paid and kept up by the municipality. It was a large house, two stories, with a wide balcony that wrapped around all four sides.

But as Matias and his wife had never had children, vast areas of the house remained dark and unused. In one such sealed room Matias established a small office. When he wasn’t below in the post office reading other people’s mail or receiving telegraphs about the latest world events, Matias was in his little office trying to predict the weather.

He had all matter of instruments, barometers, thermometers. Probably, it wasn’t too different from the type of things amateurs keep the world over. But Matias’s secrecy about his room, even from his wife, soon led to talk in the town that Matias was an alchemist dealing in nefarious activities. It was the first chatter about Matias’s supposed eccentricity. And just because it prefigured the extraordinary act he was about to embark on, it doesn’t mean that it was necessarily a fair assessment. At that moment, Matias had truly developed a scientific interest in the weather. After all, not too many years had passed since a hurricane had devastated Varadero, cutting the narrow peninsula in half until both oceans met over the sand. Matias, I think, was trying to save Santiago from the next cataclysm. He ordered all manner of new equipment from New York and tore at the packages when they arrived weeks later. Soon he built an observation deck on the roof and in clear weather began sending up weather balloons. At first, the balloons didn’t carry anything—Matias merely used them to calculate wind speeds and air pressure. But as technology improved and radio transmitters began to gain wider currency, Matias arranged for bigger and bigger balloons that could carry ever more equipment. Soon he was launching balloons as big as oil drums carrying thermometers, barometers, humidity detectors all wired to a radio that could send the information back to Matias

Ana Menéndez in his little room. Every Friday, he posted the results on the front door of the post office as well as an assessment of what the coming week’s weather was likely to be. He was right more often than he was wrong. And forgiving a few lapses, when, for example, he announced that yesterday “rain had been very heavy” (something the townspeople could know well enough without consulting any instruments other than their memories) the people grew to respect his forecasts.

Cuba had prospered in those years and along with it, Santiago, as well as Matias.

The memory of hunger was fading. Children grew healthy. Matias entered middle age in the prime of health. Even the hurricanes that had assaulted Cuba the previous decade seemed to ease and everyone everywhere seemed content, as if the more malevolent workings of the world had finally passed them by. Matias continued to go into his office every afternoon, and every Friday he emerged with the following week’s forecast. And, of course, he also continued to send up his ever more elaborate balloons.

The weather was not always perfect, but it was predictable. Soon everyone knew the rains would come in August and the heaviest thunder would be reserved for the late afternoon, when the sun began to dip low in the sky. By October, the skies would clear and the blue days return. Winters were generally dry and pleasant.

Some nights, couples out for a walk noticed a dark figure above the post office— Matias looking up into the sky. Otherwise, few people paid much attention to Matias or his forecasts anymore. They met him once a week, sometimes touched their fingers lightly to his when he handed them their mail and that was that. It seemed there was nothing left to fear.

There are eddies that develop in time, places where histories converge, and individuals caught inside the current find themselves suddenly unable to act for themselves. Perhaps this is what happened to Matias. Maybe everything that followed was as inevitable as history. There is really no other explanation for what came to pass—there was nothing in Matias’scharacter to suggest madness.

Nothing in the days preceding the event gave anyone any reason to believe that Matias had suffered a sudden depression. The weather, moreover, had been pleasantly uneventful, with an abundance of bright days somewhat unusual for springtime.

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And yet, the truth is this: One morning Matias was handing a stack of letters to Consuelo Perez and the next he was floating high above Santiago, his office chair dangling beneath four giant weather balloons with him in it.

Santiago had been the first city in Cuba to be linked by telegraph to the rest of the Caribbean. Santiago had been the first city to pioneer the use of observation balloons during war time. The telegraph had connected Cuba to the world, but in the end, the country learned it could not stand alone. Its prosperity and health were forever tethered to history and geography. Did Matias sense this? In those last years he had developed a habit of linking ideas until he’d convinced himself that there was an inherent logic running through the universe, governing even the impossible. When his own mind finally became untethered, where did it fly to?

His wife was the first to notice Matias had gone. She ran up to the observation deck and when she saw him just clearing the tops of the palms she began to shout at him, “You insolent madman, you flying fool!”

Her shouting brought out a handful of people whose shouting brought out even more people. Soon the whole town was pointing at the sky where Matias floated, sometimes rising suddenly and sometimes hanging in the air, swaying from side to side just over the tree line, every second becoming a little bit smaller in the distance. A few of the men started off after him and, when they were directly under his path, began shouting instructions at him, in the venerable Cuban tradition: “Cut one of the balloons!” “Jump now, the fronds will break your fall!” “When you make it over the swamp let the helium out very slowly!” They continued to run and shout even after it became clear that Matias was not coming back. One of the men said that just when he was becoming so small that one could hardly make out his person, Matias glanced down at the others with a wide, white smile on his face. He was like a saint or a martyr, the man said. And for days, the man could talk of nothing else but Matias’s calm happy gaze as he floated away from Santiago forever.

Matias seemed to know right where he was going. All those years of tracing wind patterns had given him a pilot’s confidence.

It was April, when the winds blow east to west. Before an hour was out he was a tiny speck out over the sea and then he was

impossible to make out in the haze. After a while most of the people stopped searching the sky for Matias. A few gathered in silence outside the post office. Matilde locked herself in the house and didn’t emerge until the governor arrived two weeks later to take a report. Some days later, the police came for his papers. They carted off hundreds of notebooks filled with strange drawings and algebraic calculations. Among the more curious of his possessions was a stuffed owl and a rare Cuban tern preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. Today, people in Cuba still say of an elusive fellow, “He vanished like Matias Padron.”

I think of Matias now and then. I am also a traveler. And nowadays after I’ve taken off my shoes and put them back on, after I’ve retrieved my naked laptop from the conveyor and had my purse rifled through, after I’ve emerged safely on the other side of the security cabal, I like to take a seat up close to the windows and watch the planes come and go.

How generous of airport architects to design such large windows. And how good of the staff to keep them so clean and shiny. Coming upon these portals is like stumbling onto a new, intricate explanation of the possible.

I sit in one of the soft, functional chairs and watch the planes land and I watch them lift off from the earth. Each time it seems like a miracle. There are so many planes flying in so many different directions that it is difficult to follow a single one. Too often, the flight path takes them beyond my line of vision. But now and then a plane will take off just so and fly straight out in view of all the airport, fly off to that point that everyone calls infinity but is really just the limit of our perception.

I’ll follow the plane until it is nothing and know that soon I will be on one just like it.

And I wonder, do we still know what it’s like to dream about the other side of the mountain? At what point does one cross the crest of forgetting? And this is when I think of Matias, who breached the space of the known for nothing more than a glimpse of the white-blind city on the other side.

Ana Menéndez is author, most recently, of the novel The Last War, forthcoming in June from HarperCollins.

rusty morrison

RUSTY MORRISON FOUR poems Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story won Ahsahta’s 2007 Sawtooth Prize and Whethering won the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, The Modern Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, Rain Taxi, Volt, Verse, and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn.

An intersection of leaves not likeness Weighted my listening to follow crow’s last caw slip beneath nightfall.

Leaning over this patch of ragwort. Every yellow tang needn’t be untangled.

My safety caught again outside its own quarantine.

Wild grasses, tamped down, dried in a whorl, delicate fingerprint.

Kicking gravel away at an exact angle, a substantively empty ambition.

Each leaf’s shape overhead is instrumental in night’s operatic expansion.

But I hear only dusk’s quiet, a supple glove to pull on, over my erratic attention.

All the vowel of cows disappearing into landscape, no dissonance.

Sharpening a vague attention on the whiteness of a star is a mastery of the emotions involved.

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rusty morrison

An intersection of leaves not likeness The tallest pine throws color back against the sky without losing balance.

An intersection of leaves not loss Here are thickets of bulrush, small-flowered with their whitening the width and length of the small bed where, again, I leave my mother’s death.

Dirtied a disappearance until it seeded, sprouted green.

Feel the blood midsummering in the pulse between magnolia petals.

In the gap between hillock and my over-identification with its bodily shape, a revising, ancient and permeable.

I imagine a thread of water, not air—not thrown, but set afloat by her last breathing. What I wasn’t there in the room to witness, I now see suspended from one tree branch to another, too delicate to be gathered and wound around the circumference of the body.

All motion is disguise—even the way I exhale and hold myself breathless, without realizing it. When is all motion entirely gone?

A requiem for the guidebook.

Suspect I’ve let an apron of atmospherics surround me when I mistake the merely for the met.

Serve purpose, but loosely. The observable rabbit hole will already be abandoned.

Mallards landing on lake water push the darkness lapping at lake’s shore.

A hollow within their loud squawks and mud scrabble. Where dusk travels.

A mothered gray, rising with dusk. After my long standing still, as if I were moving, through the white quick-rowing fog.

A small clamorous in-growth of flowering sage behind wide-leaved ivy—the way a dream hides, but never hampers, its seedheads.

Wild, spiky, helter-skelter of berry bramble, crinkled but not cramped, with dis-equilibriums. Growing bodiful, not beautiful.

As if from out of a porous spontaneity, the first night-riding star. But only to the edge of my elasticity.

Night sky, a sea of measurement’s burials.

Aerial distances are least obedient.

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rusty morrison

An intersection of leaves not loss Early wetness of morning grasses, soreness in their absorbing yellows and greens—rub them and reverse abstinence.

I hear the morning fog resting between my ear and sound.

A responsibility, dull and wide.

Empty, the morning valley, and behind the valley, my mother’s inescapable face, and behind her face, the meanings I try to make of death remain self-regulating.

This cloudlike passage of my eyes along treeline is not staring, but a dabbing and blotting of intent.

Under the rank and regime of wild iris’s color, the leaves on its flower-stalk secrete shadow—a more accurate gestation-measure of summer.

A moist odor of saffron, diffusing itself or the air around it.

My imagination’s smoothness in observing my mother’s corpse.

A slick place I still carry in my palm, and stroke.

What else must obey, inside the lungs, around the ribcage, after muscle proves itself exhaustible?

After her breathing stopped. The body is carapace. Intermittently transparent, a waterdrop.

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sally anne clegg

Sally Anne Clegg You Are Your Own Very Unique Snowflake Poppy swilled the purple liquid in her mouth and squirted it back into the cup.

“Make me see it the way you see it, then,” she said. Richard ignored her poor table manners, continuing where he had left off. “She wants attention. It’s a cry for help.”

Poppy was hunched over the butcherblock surface of the kitchen island. She had one hand on the pink plastic cup, the other hand she raised to her ear and began twisting her index finger around inside. “I don’t buy it. If she wants something she can come ask. Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about it another second.” She pulled her finger from her ear with a loud pop, and looked at her husband with quick pitying affectionate eyes. “You figure these things out when you have your own kids, Richard.

It’s the only way to extinguish a behavior.”

Before he could respond, Poppy got off her stool and picked up her purse to leave.

“I’d love to continue this, really I would,” she smirked at him, “but I have to go. It’s three thirty-eight and I have a heart surgery at four. I should be back in time for dinner.” She squashed her lips against his. “Francois is watching TV in the basement, don’t forget,” she said, then clopped across the linoleum floor and hopped quickly over Margaret’s food dish, which was positioned directly in front of the back door. One ankle buckled slightly on impact when her heels met the ground again. She halted for a moment, embarrassed, then unlocked the door and left, not once turning back towards her husband, who still sat on his stool at the island. Richard drew in his breath and coughed out a sarcastic laugh to an empty kitchen. The dishwasher changed cycles with a click and a thud.

“Cassandra? I need to talk to you, Cassandra.” Richard threw his voice to the ceiling. It echoed in the entire first floor of the house, rolling between rooms, soaking into the faux-Navajo rug from Pier 1, slapping 10

against the tile accent wall in the downstairs lavatory. He smiled as it came back to his ears again. “Nicely done,” he muttered.

When the sound stopped, Richard emitted another noise, this time a throaty hum, escalating in volume until he found the resonating pitch in the room. He was sure he saw the icicles outside the window tremble slightly as he did this. What he did not see was Margaret, who stood petrified in the entrance to the kitchen. The cat’s wide eyes were fixed on the source of the noise, and her bottlebrush tail jutted straight up.

Upstairs Richard’s stepdaughter heard her former name through the sound-extinguishing headphones clapped to her ears.

She reached for the blown-glass paperweight on the windowsill next to her bed, and dropped it on the floor. It fell on a pile of her clothes and failed to make a satisfactory noise. She didn’t bother to do it again.

Instead, she switched to a song with heavier guitar and turned the volume up as high as it would go. Then she went back to writing in her journal.

Day five. I haven’t left the second floor once. Poppy and Richard are freaking out, I think. I hear them arguing through the floor. Richard thinks it’s bad that I’m missing school, but Poppy always has to go to work before they resolve anything, so it buys me time, I guess. Her new job keeps her pretty busy and out of my hair.

It’s lucky for me that without people like her, surgical tools might be sewn into patients’ bodies slightly more often. It sucks that Richard can’t get any acting jobs, or he would be out of my hair too. The solitude is helping my fragile mental health.

There was a buzzing from the pocket of her pajama pants. She pulled out the phone and looked at the screen to see who was calling.

Richard. She opened and closed it quickly.

Also, my poetry has gotten better.

The phone began buzzing again. She reached to silence it, but felt the tightness in her stomach from hunger and answered instead. This was the time of day when Richard usually called to see what she wanted to eat. She opened the phone and put it to her ear but said nothing.

“Cassandra?” said Richard.

She didn’t respond.

“Fine, alright, what do you want to be called today?” he said.

“The same as every day, Dick, my name is Margaret.”

“That’s the cat’s name, sweetie.”

“No, asshole, it’s my pen name,” she said.

“Why did you have to rename yourself after the cat?”

“What do you want? Why did you call me?”

“I called to see if you would come down and talk about what to have for dinner.”

“I think I’ll stay up here, thanks.”

“Okay,” he said, and the line went quiet for a second. She was rather quick to fill the silence.

“I’d like fiddleheads.”

“What?” he said.

“For dinner tonight, I want fiddleheads.

You know, baby ferns. Steamed and salted.”

“I just spoke to Francois, he says he wants a Pizzone.”

“What is that?”

“It’s a pizza crossed with a calzone. From Pizza Hut.” “He’s four, Richard, he doesn’t know what he wants. Leave the fiddleheads outside my door when they’re ready, okay?”

She hung up the phone. Before she put her headphones back on, she heard her stepfather below her.

“I’m making quiche, everyone,” he called out. The radiator in the living room made soft banging noises, straining to keep the cold out. The linoleum in the kitchen buzzed with the high hum of the television on the floor below. Richard moved towards the refrigerator. He pulled out a dozen eggs, milk, and bag of salad greens from the hydrator, and shut the door with an exaggerated backward pelvic motion, which knocked most of the magnets from their places. A few photographs, bills, and pieces of Francois’s preschool artwork fell gently to the floor. Richard didn’t pick them up. Instead, he moved to the counter. A paper snowflake cutout stuck to his shoe. Francois’s teacher had written on it, in purple, “You are your own very unique snowflake.” Richard didn’t notice it. He was dropping handfuls of spinach and chopped carrot into the egg mixture when his phone rang.

“Hi Babe, it’s me,” Poppy said. In the background were other voices, scribbling sounds, wheeling sounds, a P.A. announcement. Hospital noises.

“How are you? It sounds busy,” said Richard.

“Listen,” said Poppy, “is there a dinner plan?”

sally anne clegg “I’m making dinner now.” Richard sandwiched the phone between his shoulder and cheek, then poured the filling into a store-bought piecrust. “I think Francois saw a Pizza Hut commercial, Pop, and now all he wants to eat is—” “Things are crazy here, Hon, I really can’t talk. I called to tell you that I won’t make it home to eat. We’ve had a couple emergency surgeries and I’m swamped—ski season, you know? I can barely hear you right now.”

“They need the medical assistants to stay, too? Can’t someone else count the surgical tools?”

“No Richard, they can’t. Don’t patronize me. Lives are on the line.”

“When will you get home?” he said.

“Not sure,” said Poppy, and she hung up.

Richard continued talking to the dead line.

“What do I do about Francois, Pop? What should I do?”

Richard finished the quiche and put it in the oven. He went back to his stool at the island. The room darkened. A cloud must have covered up part of the sun. He reached for the stack of his headshots he kept in a magazine rack on the countertop. All of them were the same, and all printed with “Mammoth Lakes Regional Theatre” at the top. He assigned a feeling to each identical mustached visage, and then started signing them with a Sharpie. “Pensive,” he said.

Richard Mandelbrot. “Cunning.” Richard Mandelbrot. “Wise.” Richard Mandelbrot.

“Wry.” Richard Mandelbrot. This went on.

The timer on the oven beeped into his mantra about forty minutes later. He looked up to face the sounding stove and stared at it brightly, as though it would stop on its own. Then he looked down at the pile of black and white photographs, scratching his hairline and sending a sprinkling of white skin onto his laminated face. It settled on dead gray eyes, cheeks, and lips.

Upstairs his stepdaughter heard the beeping and dropped the paperweight again. Downstairs, Richard was finally jolted from his daze, and approached the oven to remove the quiche.

Upstairs his stepdaughter heard the nightly knock and waited to hear him go down again. When he did, she went to the door and retrieved her dinner plate. On it was a large wedge of quiche, a fork, and a generous dollop of ketchup. She used to like ketchup on everything, but had cut it out of her diet of late, along with several other processed or fatty foods. She ate in bed, then 11

set the plate on the floor and picked up her journal.

Untitled, she wrote,

I leave the pie crust- when I diet The stillness in the tum Is like the stillness in a pie Between the crusts like husks of eaten corn The pies are round- I’ve sucked them dry Eggbeaters whipping ovum For that last Omelet- when the Quiche Be witnessed- In the room“Oh gosh,” she said aloud, “This is good.”

Her phone began buzzing again. Richard, the screen said. She silenced it.

Richard stood and watched snow begin to fall through the kitchen window, the flakes settling in the thatches of the metal screen, building on themselves until there was only a small amount of clear space through which he could see. He reached into the pie plate and brought a handful of quiche to his mouth. The burners on the stove made quick snapping sounds, then rushing sounds, as he turned them on.

Heady gas fumes rippled from the stovetop and rolled down on to the linoleum, where Richard was now curled in the fetal position under the island. The kitchen grew darker still.

His stepdaughter smelled the gas and opened her window. She continued writing until the odor was so strong it pulled on the corners of her self-satisfied smile, and she could no longer focus on her poem. In something of a panic she got out of bed, and her room, and slid down the carpeted staircase on sock-shod feet.

Just then Poppy got home from work.

She twisted the key in the back lock and muscled open the door with her shoulder like she always did. It hit Richard, who was crawling towards it, on the side of his head.

Poppy gasped and covered her mouth with the sleeve of her coat. She turned around, hopping back over the threshold, closely followed by her daughter, who had just come down the stairs, and a bleary-eyed Richard, half dead. Margaret lay lifeless in the kitchen.

Two stood staring for a moment; the third was sprawled in the new snow that had fallen on the driveway where they had stopped. He gulped for air and grabbed at

their ankles. Then Poppy began to scream, kicking him away and heaving her body back towards the house. Richard wrapped himself around her leg and clung to it in an attempt to pull himself up.

“I’ll go back, Pop,” he moaned to her ankle. She tried to jerk away, but teetered on one high-heeled shoe, and began to lose her balance.

“It’ll go up any minute now,” Cassandra said. Her voice was shrill and pierced the cold air, as though she thought the sound of it would break the tension, make someone act or something happen. Her teeth chattered loudly and her cell phone buzzed once.

One new voicemail, the screen said. She typed her password and waited. It was Richard’s voice. She put it on speakerphone.

“I hope you know something I don’t, Margaret, though I don’t think you do. I am not worth much of anything, Margaret. Tell your mother I am sorry I was irresponsible.

I have realized we have nothing new to add.

Any of us.”

Poppy continued tugging, hard, and broke free in a stumbling sprint toward the house, shrieking for her son. Cassandra allowed her teeth to make more noise, and clenched her fists in two tight spirals. She tried to watch, but the falling snow obscured her view. Hundreds of tiny flakes continued to settle and melt mockingly on warm heads.

Sally Anne Clegg is a writer and artist who is currently studying Studio Art and English at Goucher College in Baltimore.

“You Are Your Own Very Unique Snowflake” is her first published story.

j.r. thelin

J.R. Thelin Winner of BOMB’s 2008 Poetry Prize, Judged by Kimiko Hahn J.R. Thelin is a poet and drummer. His two chapbooks are Dorrance, Narrative, History (Pudding House Publications, 2004) and The Way Out West (Concrete Wolf, 2005). After living in rural Virginia for the past nine years, he relishes moving to a more cosmopolitan environment.

Special thanks to contest judge Kimiko Hahn, whose most recent poetry collection is The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006). BOMB congratulates the recipients of honorable mentions: Ravi Shankar and Megin Jimenez.

The Birds The dead boy glides in front of picture windows, sometimes catching errant birds before they thud themselves to death, before they hurl themselves into/against the illusion of clear, open space.

Sometimes at dusk we spy him as we try to clutch the last few moments of light before the voices of mothers and fathers and grandmothers rupture the silence of our play, whether it be wiffle ball on the Peterson’s lawn of dandelions, batters lunging for the spin of plastic and air or the onset of lightning bugs blinking on and off as the night ushers itself in like a dark, fuzzy blanket—before those voices of authority rope us in for stringy roast beef and overcooked veggies, wakened from freezers then boiled.

The dead boy’s parents no longer call him in for dinner. They know he feeds on the change of day into night, spring into fall, childhood into a temporary, but eternal, future of acne, hair and breast growth, the general humiliation of the body.

The dead boy gurgles soft and low. He calls no one on purpose except for the birds: to those he snares before he sets them loose to the sky, the true opening of worlds; and to the occasional one he misses even with his elastic arms no longer bound by sockets and joints, even with his daredevil dives that put television highlights to shame. The message is always the same, to both sets of birds. Your song never ends in the universe as long as you remember to open your beak and breathe.

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BabySittin’ Boogie The dead boy’s older sister babysits for me, my little brother, and half the neighborhood.

She plays music that buries itself under my skin . . . and itches: static-charged LPs by evil-eyed men leaping on top of screaming keyboards; black and bad bluesmen who smoke their chooglin’ guitars; big mama jamas and their barrelhouse pianos who take no lip from the likes of me.

The dead boy is another story. He puts no platters on the record player, turns it on anyway, and lowers his ear to the spinning hum, which cause his lips to crack into a mockery of a smile, his capped teeth glowering like a great white shark.

The dead boy’s sister refuses to recite to us. It’s true we’ve been able to read ourselves for years. But we love her soft, breathy tones that stroke our ears like finely spun cotton candy. And I love the crinkle in her throat. She’s so soft, the music so hard.

The dead boy never thinks anything is hard. He is the resurrection and the light in his parents’ eyes, who are so grateful, minute by minute, breath by breath, that the dead boy refuses burial, remains at home, skulking in closets, juggling dust balls, and moaning like Muddy Waters into the clean sheets he never uses.

Windows The dead boy serves a mean tea party. His guests, who stumble and stub their toes against the table legs, are mostly abandoned dolls he scavenges in alleys brimming with trash and leftovers, left out for the dead boy’s pleasure. Then, too, he uncovers them in dust-strewn garages among jewelry of paste and glass, the slanted light through gray, cracked windows piercing the pale blues and the tacky reds. This makes the dead boy’s eyes dance in their sockets.

He does not see the rays, but senses them like a motion detector protecting your house from crimes and those crusted ones who commit them.

His doll-guests sometimes turn out in crusty dresses of their own.

With one arm he pours, with the other he picks off flecks of cake and spit up set for years in their outfits. They come off like scabs, ones that feel so delicious as they leave the body, a tiny flake at a time, revealing the pink bed of skin, what lies beneath an advent calendar window.

charles mary kubricht

Charles Mary Kubricht From Slight Disturbances Several historical moments, technological stages of development, and political agendas converge at Mount Livermore, which is located 50 miles from the US–Mexico border in far West Texas. It is a landmark for drug smugglers, undocumented workers, US Border Patrol trackers, scientists, and environmentalists. By exploring the continuously shifting figure-ground relations of this multivalent landscape, the series Slight Disturbances questions what constitutes viewpoint, wholeness of form, shape, and perceptual field.

above: 6619, 03/05/2008, 3:32:35, archival inkjet print, 2008, 10 × 13 inches. All images courtesy of the artist.

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overleaf: 4834, 08/31/2007, 10:32:51, archival inkjet print, 2007–8, 13 × 10 inches.

page 16: 5184, 09/01/2007, 4:21:53, archival inkjet print, 2008, 10 × 13 inches.

charles mary kubricht

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ben ehrenreich

Fiction for Driving across America Ben Ehrenreich from Everything You See Is real Download and listen to a podcast of Ben Ehrenreich reading this story on BOMBLog. 1. The Interstate All along the Interstate, Baker saw scraps of paper skipping through the air like moths.

Sunbleached corners of newsprint, weathersoftened cardstock, blue-lined sheets of looseleaf paper drifted in the breeze and in the quick eddies of air kicked up by passing semis. Baker squinted through his sunglasses and tugged on his long ears. Where did all this paper come from?

He felt something twitch between his legs. His cell phone, resting there on the seat in the V formed by his thighs, was ringing. He picked it up, glanced at the number on the screen and hit reject. The next exit was half a mile off. It appeared in seconds, and Baker took it. As soon as he turned off the Interstate, the clouds of paper thinned.

He braked slowly through an endless, beige landscape of desiccated fields varied only by a few leafless trees and a vague line in the indefinite distance where the earth dropped off and the sky, yellow with dust, took over.

Baker looked both ways, turned right at the light, and pulled into a truck-stop parking lot a quarter mile down the road. He turned the engine off. Heat flooded the car.

Baker unstrapped his seat belt and regarded himself for a moment in the mirror on the flip side of his sun visor. He saw a face that 17

was recognizably his own: his nose, his lips, long ears and close-shorn hair. But instead of his eyes he saw his sunglasses, a smaller, narrower version of his face reflected in their lenses, and in that image, the lenses again, and a still smaller version of himself.

His shirt had already begun to stick to his chest, so Baker cracked the window and got out of the car.

Inside, the air felt almost liquid with cold, as if he had entered not just an air-conditioned convenience store, but a different environment entirely. The shelves were stacked with bottled antifreeze, fuel-line lubricants, steering wheel and seat covers, mud flaps depicting pistol-wielding mice. A clerk sat hunched over the counter, almost hidden behind the tubs of beef jerky and brightly colored plastic jars of stimulants. “What’s an eight letter word for bugbear, last letter g?” the clerk said, bouncing a pencil by its eraser against a folded crossword puzzle “Try golliwog,” Baker replied.

“Two els?”

Baker nodded.

“That a word?”

“Yes,” Baker said. “Got a phone?”

“Damn, golliwog. That fits,” the clerk said. “Pay phone’s round the side. And here, take this.” He tossed Baker a smooth, unmarked coin. A tiny hole had been drilled through its center, and a length of fishing line threaded through the hole. “Just bring it back when you’re done.”

On the side of the building, Baker found an old, blue phone booth, its plexiglass panels rendered opaque by graffiti scratched long ago with pocketknives and keys. None of it was legible. It smelled like rust inside, and old leaves. The floor was lined with uneven ribbons of yellowed paper. He took his cell phone from his hip pocket and scrolled through the call log until he found the number. He dialed it into the payphone’s keypad, and when the operator’s voice told him how much money to deposit, he dipped the coin into the slot, pulling it up again by the fishing line and letting it drop until the phone was satisfied that it had been paid.

Baker listened through the receiver. Four rings, then an answering machine and a voice of indeterminate gender: “Leave a message,” the voice said. Baker listened to the beep and to the crackling silence that followed it, then returned the handset to its hook.

For miles, the Interstate was empty. Baker

did not pass a single car or truck. Still, he drove the speed limit and checked his mirrors often. Sometimes clouds of torn paper circled his car like a flock of starlings chasing off a hawk. Sometimes the paper thinned for a mile or two and then rose up in sudden dust devils above the median. He switched on the radio and found a Christian station.

“It’s always double-coupon day with Jesus!” the preacher said, but his sermon was soon devoured by static, and when Baker pressed the seek button, the digits circled round and round, catching on nothing.

He passed dead fields and green fields, and watched a crop duster dip low to spray the green ones, excreting over them a cone of yellow mist that disintegrated as it neared the earth. Baker drove past what might have been a coyote, or someone’s dog, splattered beside the guardrail. He passed an armadillo lying on its back, feet in the air like a cartoon corpse. He watched the swallows that made their nests in the concrete overpasses wing and dive, harvesting an invisible crop of insects. Once a crow flew across the highway, a full sheet of notepaper in its beak. Baker swerved a lane to the right, but still, he almost hit the bird.

Then the highway curved in a long arc to the right, and in the distance Baker could see colored dots floating above the horizon.

As he approached, they grew into signs advertising fast food restaurants, gas stations, and chain motels. The signs sat perched atop high metal poles, like the eyes of snails on stalks, watchful among the papers drifting in the breeze. His tank was getting low, and he was hungry, so Baker nudged his turn signal on and took the first exit into town. Again, the papers disappeared as soon as he left the Interstate. He saw dried leaves blowing about, and dragonflies, but that was all. As he cruised down the exit ramp, for just a moment Baker thought he saw something in the ditch beside the road.

It looked like a person’s leg, a naked leg with no person attached to it. But in the rear view mirror he could see only rocks, soda cans, a sun-bleached log, so he drove onward, looked both ways, and turned right at the stop sign.

Baker drove past a Burger King, a McDonalds, a Wendy’s, a Wattaburger, two Hardee’s, a Foster’s Freeze and a small stand called El Crazy Taco Indeed. He pulled into the parking lot of a diner with a neon sign that was blinking so rapidly that it could not be read. Baker parked between two white pickup trucks, cracked the windows and

Everybody knows they lost something or they gave something up or had something snatched away from them, something that was everything to them, that was who and what they are, and every single one of them is running after it even when they’re standing still. locked the doors.

He took a seat at the end of the counter. The waitress placed a menu in front of him and poured him a cup of coffee without asking if he wanted one. “Don’t order the fish,” she said, and walked away.

Without looking up from his lap, the man on the stool beside Baker made a kissing noise which trailed out into a long, low hiss.

“That bitch,” he said. “Wants all the fish for herself.”

“I don’t like fish,” Baker said.

“You wouldn’t,” the man said. “It’s awful. It’s not even fish.”

“What is it?” Baker asked.

“I think it’s clams,” the man said, and continued to stare beneath the counter into his lap, where, he hid a pencil and a square of folded newspaper. “What’s a six-letter word for lozenge?” the man asked.

“Try troche,” Baker said.

“That’s not a word,” the man said, and then asked how to spell it. Baker spelled it for him.

The man penciled in the letters. “Doesn’t look right,” he said, but before Baker could respond, the waitress was standing across the counter again, asking what he wanted.

Her face was flat and stiff, as if it had been carved from driftwood and sanded excessively. He ordered the sirloin steak, rare.

When the waitress had gone away, the man beside him cursed again. “Whore,” he said.

“There a phone nearby?” Baker said.

The man nodded to the left. “In the restroom.”

Baker walked down the hall and through the door marked “gents.” Directly above the urinal, a pay phone had been mounted on the wall. Baker took his cell phone from his pocket, checked the call log, and punched the number into the pay phone’s keypad.

He inserted the truckstop clerk’s slug into the coin slot, fished it up, and dropped it again until the operator’s voice said, “Thank you.”

On the second ring, the door swung open behind him. A little boy rushed in. His fly was already unzipped. “‘Scuse me,” the boy said. He wedged himself between Baker’s legs and the urinal, and, standing on tippy-toes, commenced to pee. The machine answered. “Leave a message,” the voice 18

said, and Baker hung up the phone. When Baker looked down, he saw the boy staring up at him. The stream of his urine splashed against the tiled wall. A puddle was forming around Baker’s shoes.

That night, Baker stayed in a motel just off the interstate. There was a Motel 6 across the street, and a Super 8 beside it, but Baker chose a generic tumbledown inn with an empty pool, a pitted parking lot, and no discernible name at all save “Vacancy.” He could not find the remote, so he sat barefoot on the folded orange bedspread and flipped through the channels using the buttons at the base of the television. He switched past a shopping channel selling hunting rifles, past a cartoon in which what looked like a talking penis was wrestling with a grinning yellow sponge. On the next channel two elderly men took turns sodomizing a very young woman wearing only a plaid schoolgirl’s skirt and stockings. She stared at the camera without blinking, without any expression at all save an almost impossible degree of boredom, a heroic, life-preserving blankness.

Baker watched for a moment. He cracked open a tiny one and a half ounce bottle of bourbon that in his palm looked like a normal-sized bottle that had been shrunk by some evil, teetotaling magician. Baker tipped back his head, emptied the bottle into his mouth, and changed the channel.

Two newscasters with furrowed brows discussed the abduction of a teenaged girl from a Walmart parking lot. Her face appeared in the top right corner of the screen.

She looked very much like the girl in the plaid skirt from the previous channel, down to the furious absence in her eyes. Baker flipped past newsreel footage of the bombing of Dresden, a show about tornadoes, a preacher with his eyes rolled back, speaking in tongues. “Oola boola lickety ragu,” said the preacher, pausing to fix his hair and then ranting some more. On the next channel a reporter interviewed a man in a military uniform with four stars on his epaulettes who, Baker noticed, closely resembled one of the old men from the porn channel, and the preacher as well. “It is a question and will continue to be a question,” the officer said,

jabbing at the air with his fist, “of sustained, vigorous, and concentrated effort.”

Baker turned off the television. He twisted open another bottle and poured its contents down his throat. He sat there at the edge of the bed for a while and stared at his reflection in the blank screen, then at his pale brown toes on the blue and green flecked motel carpet. He got up, fished through the vinyl toiletry case he had placed on the counter by the sink, took two pills from a plastic vial and swallowed them with a palmful of water from the tap. He lay down on the bed and stared at the pebbled plaster of the ceiling. If he let his will to focus lapse, patterns appeared, spirals and paisleys, concentric circles like the ripples left by a stone on the surface of a pond. Then the patterns dissolved and images took shape: landscapes first, hills and bays, valleys wrinkled like an old woman’s back; then bodies and parts of bodies, the curve of an instep, the hanging flesh above a fat man’s elbow, the fold of an eyelid, a gaping nostril, the soft plain of a thigh.

A strange, metallic whining interrupted Baker’s reverie. His cell phone was ringing.

He grabbed the phone from the top of the television, checked the number, and hit reject. Then he stepped into his shoes and, without tying the laces, left the room.

Baker jogged across the parking lot of the KFC beside his motel and over to the pay phone that stood alone beneath a streetlamp beside the AM/PM at the end of the block. He consulted his cell phone, dialed the number that appeared on its screen, and paid for the call using the truckstop clerk’s slug. He heard four rings, then the answering machine. “Leave a message,” the voice said. He did not.

As he walked back to his room, a teenaged girl emerged from among the parked cars to ask him for a quarter. She was heavy, with pale, stick-skinny legs and a face that seemed to have been constructed out of bubbles. She wore a short skirt and too much eyeliner. She called Baker “Mister.”

“Don’t have a quarter,” Baker said.

“Then how’d you use the phone?” the girl asked.

“Magic.”

“You got a magic 100-dollar bill?” said the girl, but Baker didn’t answer. She walked beside him. “You staying over there?” she

ben ehrenreich asked, nodding towards the motel in the distance.

Baker nodded.

“Place is a dump,” she said.

Baker agreed.

“You must be pretty lonely,” she said.

Again, Baker did not answer.

“I am,” she said. “Lonely, I mean. Could use some company. Could use some fun.”

They reached the door to his room. Baker took the key from his pocket. The girl leaned against the door. “Could I just come in for a little while?” she asked. “Just to take a shower?”

The sun rose in Baker’s rear-view mirror.

The sky turned pink behind him and then a brief, shocking orange until a dull wall of ochre fell around him, obscuring the sun and all but a few bright, nervous streaks of blue. It occurred to Baker that he was fleeing the dawn, that you could look at it like that if you wished to, but that despite all his efforts to get away, he was driving into day.

Pages torn from a paperback book danced around his windshield. A motorcycle cop rode his bumper for a mile or so, but lost interest and sped off in the fast lane. Baker saw a screech owl sitting on a speed limit sign. For a moment he was certain that he saw a human foot on the dotted white line dividing the lanes. But the light was still low and always deceptive, so he did not brake and did not think of it again.

When his cell phone rang, Baker fished it from his pocket and hit reject. He had to drive for fifteen minutes before he found an exit. He made the call from a pay phone outside a Waffle House. When the machine answered, he immediately hung up.

Across the street he saw a restaurant with red shutters and a peaked, shingled roof. Two signs above the door read “homecookin” and “kountry-style,” but one of the o’s in “cookin’” and the one in “kountry” had been smashed. Baker looked both ways, crossed the two lanes of asphalt and opened the restaurant door.

He took a seat at the counter. A waitress sitting on a high stool poured him a coffee without looking up from her crossword.

“What can I get you?” she asked.

“Breakfast,” Baker said.

“Eggs?”

“Okay. Scrambled hard.”

“Bacon?” the waitress asked.

“Ham,” said Baker.

“Toast?”

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“Pumpernickel. No crust.”

“You got it,” the waitress said, but didn’t get up. “You wouldn’t happen to know,” she asked, “a nine letter word for ‘hag’? I think it’s got a k in there somewhere, towards the end.”

“Try ‘grimalkin,’” Baker said.

“Grimalkin?”

Baker spelled it. The woman looked up at Baker from beneath one lowered eyebrow.

“You make that up?”

“No,” said Baker.

In the booth behind him, a man with long, gray sideburns and hair dyed black dropped his newspaper with disgust beside his empty plate. “That’s the thing about this goddamned place,” he said, apparently to no one.

The woman sitting alone in the next booth, whose back was to the side-burned man, answered him. “Place?” she said. She wore wide, pink-rimmed sunglasses and her hair was tightly permed. She faced forward when she spoke, as if her interlocutor were sitting directly across from her.

“This place, this country, this goddamned nation here,” said the side-burned man, without turning around.

“The thing about it is,” said the woman, spearing a nub of sausage with her fork.

“The thing about it, the goddamned thing is that everyone is from someplace goddamned else. Which means this place ain’t real at all. It don’t even exist, really.”

“Explain,” the woman said.

“What I mean is everyone here’s immigrants or they’re refugees from someplace else or they’re slaves who got brought here without asking to come or they’re Indians, and that amounts to the same thing because the first thing the rest of us did when we got here was messed the damn place up so much that even the Indians felt like they was from someplace else.”

“Somewhere with buffalo,” the woman said, biting off a corner of toast.

“That’s right, with buffalo. Then that wasn’t enough, so we went and moved the poor bastards halfway across the continent so they could share in the experience. Moved ’em to some hole in the desert where nothing grows or some hole like Oklahoma, so they weren’t where they were from neither.”

“And the thing about it?” the woman said.

The waitress slid Baker’s plate down on the counter. “Here you go honey, no crusts.” She shook her head. “Grimalkin.

Never would’ve got that.”

“The thing,” the man behind Baker went on, “is that everybody’s missing something, and it’s something big—something exactly as big as this country. It’s exactly what this country is, if you follow me, it’s that thing gone missing. Everybody knows they lost something or they gave something up or had something snatched away from them, something that was everything to them, that was who and what they are, and every single one of them is running after it even when they’re standing still. They’re looking to get it back somehow, take it back, steal it back, build it from scratch if they have to, but they don’t know what the heck it was anymore, they forgot and their daddies forgot and their granddaddies forgot, so none of them has the wee-est inkling of what it was they lost, what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it felt like to be there, if it was worth any damn thing to begin with. But that don’t stop anyone, they want it bad.”

Baker tore open the foil sealing a plastic container of grape jelly and smeared some on his toast. The waitress filled his coffee cup. “Don’t pay them any mind,” she whispered. “They got nothing else to do.”

“So that’s the thing?” the woman with the sunglasses said.

“No,” said the side-burned man. “That’s just the thing that makes them dangerous.”

In the parking lot, walking to his car, Baker paused beside a yellow station wagon, the old kind with the fake-wood panels on the sides. He noticed it only because sitting on the cracked plastic of the dash was what looked like a severed head. The windshield was dirty and the glare of the sun made it hard to see anything through it. The side windows were even worse, smeared to opacity, as if a dog had rubbed its snout methodically against every square centimeter of glass. The head could have been plastic, some halloween gag or horror movie prop, but it looked real enough. Its nose was flat, its eyes closed. Its lips appeared to have been sewn together with thick, black thread, the hair sheared almost to the scalp, but unevenly, as if it had been cut with a knife and not with scissors. Baker squinted at the thing, tugged his ears, and unlocked the door to his car.

The landscape changed. Flat fields gave way to jagged hills, long runnels of rust-

ben ehrenreich colored sand, weird lumps of rock that looked like they’d been hurled at the earth by some mischievous child god. Sometimes the rocks were black and sometimes they were red. For a little while, when the sun was at its highest, the asphalt seemed a pale and washed-out green and Baker could not think of a name for the color of the earth beside it.

A jackrabbit bolted bug-eyed in front of Baker’s tires. He waited for the thud of impact, but it did not come and when he looked in his mirror he saw nothing, no corpse on the asphalt and no limping bunny, and he wondered if he had really seen the rabbit at all. How could he trust his eyes?

Papers swirled like butterflies except when they did not. Puddles of water took shape when the road dipped in the distance, the reflected sky rippling on the surface of the Interstate. Despite himself, Baker found that he was surprised and weirdly disappointed when the mirages evaporated one after another.

He passed a sign warning of the proximity of a prison. “Do not pick up hitchhikers,” it said. But Baker saw no hitchhikers, and though he scanned the horizon for it, he did not see the prison either. Instead he saw white shreds of paper stippling miles of mustard-colored scrub, car lots gleaming in the sun, a waterpark in the distance, blue slides twisting one around the other, snaking up into the sky. That night, though, he would dream of the prison. In his dream it would fill a dark basin between two hills, its floodlights and the lights on the guard tower and the glittering reflection of the razorwire glowing in the sky for miles, a regular city of light, some shard of heaven carved recklessly off and abandoned here below.

Baker stopped for lunch somewhere on the outskirts of the state’s second largest city, which as far as he could tell consisted of four tall buildings—the headquarters for a mortgage broker, a private security firm, two banks—surrounded by outlet malls, tract housing, storage lots. He chose a place called Milky D’s. He ordered the friedpot-roast sandwich special to go, and went to the men’s room while his food was being prepared. He peed and washed his hands, drying them with a paper towel from the dispenser on the wall. On the way out of the bathroom, he dropped the crumpled towel into the trash can, in which he could not help but notice—among other paper towels, 21

a chewing gum wrapper and an empty pack of Marlboros—a dozen or more flies perched upon a small, brown hand. Baker kicked at the base of the trash can, and the hand fell to the bottom, out of sight.

Sitting in his car at the shady end of the parking lot with the AC blowing hard, Baker squeezed mayonnaise from a little metallic packet onto the shredded lettuce that covered the upper bun of his sandwich. He ate his lunch in slow, meditative bites, then went back into the restaurant for a coffee.

He visited the men’s room once more before he left, just to check, but the trash can had been emptied, and there was nothing in it save a shiny black bag. Baker pulled at his ears, washed his hands again, and left to make his phone call from one of the two McDonald’s on the other side of the street.

That afternoon, a highway patrolman pulled him over. Baker handed the policeman his license and registration and asked if he’d been speeding. The policeman didn’t answer, but asked Baker for proof of insurance and then asked where he was headed.

“South-southwest,” Baker said.

“You’re almost out of south-southwest,” the patrolman said.

“Looks that way,” Baker agreed.

“Here on business?”

“Yeah. Business.”

“What kind?

“Passing through, officer. Just passing through.”

The policeman smiled. “You know why I stopped you?”

Baker looked at the dark flesh of his own forearm and at the policeman’s pink cheeks. “I got an idea,” Baker said.

“No,” the policeman said, still smiling, “you don’t. No one told you to get an idea, so where in fuck would you get one?” The policeman did not, to Baker’s mild surprise, ask him to get out of the car or to open his trunk. Instead he handed back Baker’s laminated drivers license and the registration and insurance papers for the car. “Just pass on through,” he said, “if you’re passing through.”

One hour after he returned to his motel room from the pay phone outside the corner laundromat that evening, Baker heard a rattling on the bedside table. His cellphone had begun to vibrate. He picked it up. He had a text message. Baker glanced at the

closed door of the bathroom. He could still hear the shower running, and the voice of a woman singing to herself. The message was only two words long. “Almost there,” it said.

Baker heard the water turn off in the bathroom and the sound of wet feet slapping on the floor. He pulled his pants and shirt back on, uncapped another tiny bottle of bourbon, drank it, and erased the message with a few strokes of his thumb. The bathroom door opened and a woman stepped into the room wearing only a towel. She was short-legged and long-armed, with a tattoo of what looked like a scallion just above her ankle. She looked at Baker, her eyes a question, but Baker shook his head. “You’ve got to go,” he said.

Baker waited for five minutes after the woman had left, then went out the door as well. He did not return to the phone at the laundromat, but walked in the other direction, hopping the curbs and the hedges that divided one parking lot from another until he reached the bank of pay phones outside the Pic ’n’ Save. The first phone he tried was broken, but the next one worked. On the fourth ring, the machine answered. Baker did not hang up. Instead he closed his free ear with one finger, shut his eyes, and listened hard.

It was not silence that he heard. No one could call that silence. There was a buzzing around the edge of it, and softer tendrils of sound shooting through its center and waving around there, as if searching for something they could not see. The buzzing seemed to expand and contract, as if the answering machine had lungs or, like a fish, an air bladder. It occurred to Baker that it might be his own breathing that he heard, or the beating of his heart, but he dismissed the thought when the machine beeped a second time to indicate that it was no longer recording, that no one could listen to whatever was said thereafter, and Baker then heard a real silence, one broken only by his own breathing and the heavy pulse of blood as it passed through his temple and his ear.

Baker dreamed that night of fire. He dreamed of cities on continents he had never visited, fire descending on them from the sky, rolling through them like a wave that breaks in all directions at once. When the fire had run through them, the cities still stood, and Baker ran after the fire, first in one direction,

ben ehrenreich and then in another. But the fire was faster than he was, and he could not catch it.

While Baker slept, the wind kicked up a storm of soiled newspapers, driving directions printed from the internet, poems torn from journals that nobody reads, empty crosswords waiting to be filled, full-color photos of teen fellatio ripped from dirty magazines, lined sheets of notepaper on which no words will ever be written. But Baker, sleeping, saw none of it, and did not see the sawn off hands and feet and fingers and ears scattered around the parking lot and the field of scrub behind it or, the legs piled like firewood outside his door. Baker saw only fire, and not even that, because that was only a dream, and no one else could see it.

2. The Wall In the car the next day, Baker remembered his dream. The Interstate curved and he was suddenly blinded by the red light of the morning sun reflecting off the border wall.

It seemed for just a moment as if the world were on fire again, and the fire were running away from him. He was still miles from the wall, but from this distance it was nonetheless impressive, obscuring the horizon with its mirrored length as far as he could see. That is perhaps not the best choice of words though, for as much as it obscured one horizon—the one behind it—it replicated another.

Green signs along the side of the highway warned, “International Border.” As he approached, the wall grew taller. Papers fluttered gaily in the air above the asphalt like confetti at a parade that no had one remembered to attend. Baker took the last exit before the Interstate ran out, looked both ways, then made a series of turns down narrow, unpaved streets, passing dusty clapboard houses and children on bicycles dragging kites, until his car was just yards from the wall. He stopped and set the parking brake. This far from the Interstate, the air was free of paper. He could see himself right there in the wall’s mirrored surface, sitting erect, his fingers tapping the wheel. He half expected to see someone sitting in the car beside him, or in the backseat, but of course there was no one. This close up, he had to bend forward and crane his neck to glimpse the top of the wall, a barely detectable line where the reflected blue of the sky met the actual sky, which was lighter, and looked less substantial than its image.

Baker had run out of road. The pavement 22

ended a few feet beyond his front bumper, but a rough track had been worn by other vehicles in the dirt beside the wall. He turned right and drove along it, weaving where he had to weave to avoid the worst ruts. When he looked out the window to his left, he saw himself there in the driver’s seat of a white sedan, a plume of red dust rising behind him as he drove. His image did as he did, looking forward when he looked forward and obediently turning right when he turned left to regard himself in the wall’s surface. Still, he wondered what it had to do with him. He passed a few abandoned cars, coated in the same red dirt. Before long he came across a Border Patrol Jeep driving in the opposite direction, and he had to pull into the thorns and brush to allow the other vehicle to pass. The Jeep’s driver stopped beside him and rolled down his window.

Baker did the same.

“State your citizenship,” the driver said, and Baker did.

“ID,” the driver said. Baker passed his license through the window.

The driver inspected it, typed something into the computer bolted to his dashboard and handed the license back. He wore an olive green uniform and mirrored sunglasses, and Baker could see his reflection in their lenses, a smaller, more distorted version of the image he saw in the wall on the other side of the Jeep. “You lost?” the agent said, staring not at Baker any longer, but at the green and white monitor of his computer, as if waiting for an answer there.

“No, sir.”

The agent nodded. “Careful,” he said, and rolled his window closed.

The track was rough and Baker’s progress slow. The rattling of the car ran up his spine and into his jaw. It made his teeth hurt.

The dust was bad, so he kept the windows closed, but it crept in through the vents until a fine layer of red powder coated the seats and the dash and the inner surface of the windows. Sometimes the track dropped precipitously and then rose up again, and Baker knew that if a car were coming in the opposite direction, he would not be able to see or hear it, and would almost certainly hit it head on. He kept his cell phone on the seat between his legs and occasionally checked its screen. It always said the same thing: No Signal.

After a few hours, the track along the border wall intersected with a paved road.

Baker turned onto it, and drove until he hit a small town: a few leaning stucco houses, a gas station with a single pump, two bars, a post office, a video store and a café called “You And Me Got Business To Attend To.” He filled his tank, checked the oil and the air pressure of his tires, washed the red dust from both sides of his windows.

The door to the café was open, but there was no one behind the counter or at any of the four vinyl-upholstered booths. Baker heard a thin stream of dance music coming from the kitchen. He walked behind the counter and knocked at the double doors.

No one answered but the radio. “Give it to my body,” it sang, “and I’ll give it to your body.” Baker pushed open the door and said, “Hello?”

In the far corner of the kitchen, a darkhaired girl in an apron sat with her feet propped up on the lip of the sink. She had a ballpoint pen in one hand, a newspaper folded on her lap. She was bobbing her head to the music, singing to herself. It took her a moment to notice Baker standing in front of her.

The girl jumped to her feet.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Baker said.

The girl blushed. “Take a seat,” she said, recovering herself. “Be right with you.”

Baker sat at the counter and waited for the girl to come out and pour his coffee.

She brought him a menu and a fork and knife wrapped in a paper napkin. Most of the items on the menu had been crossed out in ballpoint ink. “I guess I’ll have the chicken soup,” Baker said. “And the chicken plate.”

“Fries or cole slaw?” the girl asked.

“Both,” said Baker. “You got a phone I can use?”

“Round the back.”

As Baker walked to the door, the girl called out to him. “Hey,” she said, smiling a crooked, closed-mouthed smile, as if she were embarrassed by her teeth. “You wouldn’t by any chance know a four-letter word for ‘beaver pelt,’ would you?”

Baker winked. “Try flix.”

Baker drove all afternoon, up and down the rutted track, gripping the wheel with both hands until his elbows felt as unsteady as the road itself. For a long stretch he listened to a radio station from the other side, and though he did not understand the language the broadcasters spoke, he enjoyed the easy rhythms of their voices and the manic

ben ehrenreich melancholy of the music that they played.

But then static took over, and it was all Jesus after that, so Baker turned the radio off.

Just before sunset, he found a motel a hundred feet from the border wall. The clerk gave him a corner room. Its bay window faced the wall, and when Baker pulled back the drapes, he saw himself reflected in the wall’s surface, standing next to the door to his room, his hands spread and leaning on the windowsill, a table lamp shining beside him. “That’s me,” Baker thought. “What am I doing over there?”

He looked at the dust-coated tires of his car and at its antenna swaying with the breeze, but there was little else of the world that he could see directly, without the aid of the wall. In its mirrored surface, though, he could see the entirety of the motel parking lot, the blinking neon sign (no name again but “Vacancy”), the other rooms, all of them apparently uninhabited, or at least dark, with drapes pulled shut. His car was alone in the lot. He could see a few mesquite bushes and what he thought must be palo verde shrubs, their branches clogged with fast food wrappers and shredded plastic grocery bags. And he could see, if he looked

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up, a red-tailed hawk circling patiently in the sky, though he knew that it was not actually where he saw it in front of him, because the wall was there, and what he saw was its reflection. The actual hawk was directly above his room.

It was only when the phone rang behind him that Baker became aware of the enormity of the silence that surrounded him, as if he had been staring out the porthole of a submarine from far beneath the surface of the sea. The phone was loud, brutal even.

It took him a moment to realize that it was not his cell that was ringing, but the yellow plastic motel phone on the table beside the bed. Baker picked up the receiver and held it to his ear. The connection was poor. He heard a crackling, and a series of hollow clicks intruding on a thick, convex buzzing.

Then someone said his name. He did not recognize the voice. It began to say something else, and then the line went dead.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel The Suitors. He lives in Los Angeles. “Everything You See Is Real” can be read in its entirety on BOMBsite.com.

laura mullen

Laura Mullen Laura Mullen is the author of five books, most recently Murmur (Futurepoem, 2007). She is the recipient of Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a Rona Jaffe Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been widely anthologized, most recently in American Hybrid (Norton, 2009), and her prose has appeared in the anthologies Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action and Paraspheres.

She teaches at Louisiana State University.

Ghost Mist (Pacific Coast Highway) This vagueness in the air

Shifts Thin then To the point of blankness

Thick Turns thought back Slowed as the road On itself twists no Regrets yes perhaps

Nothing I’d change I wouldn’t change This Cypress and cliff in gray on gray Silhouette Vanishing field of silvery Green grass fence road bright Line meant to be Still visible in this still Visible in this Dulled glass A long glance down the black Fog-blurred coast Gone that Past is not this Present but What keeps Time from time loosens Melts damp salt Slur of obscuring air Dissolving rocks Fading flash of white Once known Come home In gusts as guessed

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laura mullen

With the kiss of white on white pages the book shuts a brideto-be dreams her dress a deep pile of ashes the wind lifts unfurling the long pale flag of shreds to lace and then this red incoherence the few stuttered vanishing words of the service dust to dust the shadow of meanings cast over these open snowfields after the weeping faithless reader through whose burning eyes what lies ahead passes

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Glitch In the middle of a dark plot, a complicated story, squares of bright green light smear open and the character turning to speak is suddenly scattered: little stacked blocks of face and body stalled behind him where he is now—still trying to speak (in bits and pieces, in pixels)—at differing levels. Representing an actual person (an actor) and also representation. One eye vivid and lovely, the other an unlit window, his open mouth some disconnected ideas about a mouth, some partial theories and doubts, now several mouths, existing in various parts of the same sentence or word, even, open and shut. His hands time lapsed fragments strewn through a gesture, his shoulders a structure being demolished as he turns to speak. And likeness. The image a series of unconnected versions, differing aspects of the subject, Cubist, but literally: everything broken down into exactly the same shape beneath all shapes, little boxes of color. Ongoing ghastly analysis of his speech—wurrrghc brggguhdrvl—also cracked or dissolving into pure system. Syllable to sound: meaning’s revealed as made out of meaninglessness we speed or slow into shape and message, pressure into expected phrase. A speck of dust or an invisible-to-the-naked-eye scratch in the shining surface of the disc and everything twinkles, skips, drags: blisters of hot chartreuse and fire-opal orange appear, unbelievable colors usually lost doing their part in the work of representation suddenly appear as themselves. Then there’s almost no story in the frame held onto too long, as the protagonist, turning to speak, turns into some suggestions or cartoon shards of human features tossed in the mad workings of the excited medium itself, a stew, all process. As if we could watch the distance of ceasing to care, or forgetting: see what it looks like. “You’re...” he says, and then, mammmurghovzwughurghlf. What it does to us. Repeated cleanings and re-loadings leading to the same breakdown in roughly the same place, and now in the smoothest movie the memory always there of those disparate bits of information forced into a flow. Memory of memory itself: liable to quit at any instant at the site of some invisible scar, aware of the work of desire. But—paused there—so the fear of breaking up might be gradually replaced by something like an understanding of our brokenness: a sort of undulant surface tension tugged at by both the will to present some success and an increasing desire to inhabit and explore the spaces opened by a failure not quite not quite not quite complete.

michael martone

Michael Martone Dutch Boy 32-V Soap Opera 32-V-1 If you ask him, her husband finds it strange that she paints and repaints so often the living room of their house. If you ask her, and he never does, she would not tell you the real reason she paints and repaints the living room of their house. She paints and repaints the living room when she believes she will, finally, break it off with her lover of long standing, a man she has slept with, off and on, for a dozen years now. Sometimes she paints after she has told him it is over, painting as a distraction or painting as a reward to herself, or painting as a dramatization that she has moved on, but, by the time she finishes, she has called him or he has called her. Inhaling the heady odor of the drying paint, she weeps into the phone to say she wants to meet again. At other times, she begins to paint in order to build up momentum to tell him it is over, the painting as a kind of mental conditioning, a signal for her to signal her lover that their affair must come to an end. It is perhaps the thick rich smell of the paint, the vapor of its evaporation, that is the trigger, canned inspiration. That perfume’s endnote is the endnote of the affair.

Or, perhaps, it is now the visual stimuli of blur, the blur the paint mixer makes at the paint store, as it mixes the cans—the cans vice-locked in place tight with the thumbscrews, plates, and springs. The electric motor whirs, the slurring glug of the liquid inside the cloud of can, that metallic blubbering blurring. Or there is the folding and the unfolding of the paint-splattered drop cloth with its sloppy archeological record of the past paintings, the drips and smears in stark contrast to the pristine walls whose color never really has had time to age or dull or even fade as the paint has always been so relatively recently applied. Sometime the paint hasn’t had the time to dry, has barely even dried before she begins to mask out the window sills and door jambs with the blue, blue masking tape whose sound, that long zipped ripping, also contributes to this 26

ritual of change—the whole elaborate complex of her particular compulsion that the larger project, consciously and unconsciously, conspicuously represents. To mask. It is complicated. It has never been easy for her, the affair, and the energy expended in meeting, the anxiety of discovery, and the persistence of guilt—all of it goes into the walls regularly. Painting draws this thing to a close and painting promises a new beginning.

Clean slate. Egg shell finish, of course. And painting, the sheer act of painting, there is in it a soothing contemplative repetitive exercise, an applied yoga of application, that allows her to meditate on the course of the affair, its ups and downs, her marriage, its lefts and rights. As she paints she eyes the various shades of aching grief, the tint of ecstatic pleasure. She paints with brush and roller. She stirs and stirs, watches the paint slide down the stick, drip, like paint, into the soup of this occasion’s color. The drips drip, disturb the surface tension on the surface of the paint in the can. She knows, now, these four walls intimately. Here the slight buckle of the load bearing, there a water stain that she never quite seals or covers. She’s spackled again, patched the holes made by the picture hanging. The wall opposite the picture window warms differently than the wall with the window. Painting again the four walls will bring her face to face with memories of when she painted these four walls before. In that corner she thought this, or along the floorboard, there, she thought that and when she gets to those places again with this new paint she will remember what she was thinking two or three coats ago and remember remembering, just a coat before, what she was thinking and remembering about her thinking now all mapped on the wall, a location that coordinates with the wiring in the gray matter of her brain. Here around this outlet she thought of her thinking, thinking about her gray brain. She loads the brush, it is always a new brush, to begin again to paint the living room. The furniture pushed to the center of the room covered over by the dappled drop cloths that form a kind of scale model of an idealized mountain range, its glacial folds falling to the floor covered by the new unspoiled ice blue tarp.

Marblehead 32-V-2 It will be a gray this time, another gray. She is thinking this, this gray, even while her lover is finishing behind her. Her hands are flat

against the wall, pushing the wall to push back against him as he pushes into her. She has already come. The wall in front of her is a gray. She can’t be sure. There’s a trick of the light in the room as the late afternoon shadows break across the surface before her eyes. She senses an unevenness, what seems to be another kind of shadow, a shadow of the drywall in the space between her spread arms, flexing, springing back against him. No amount of paint can disguise it, a sloppy application of the mud, that lack of sanding. Tomorrow she will look through the paint chips for the right gray.

There are hundreds of chips, each tweaked to register the slight variation of brightness, intensity, saturation. After she has been with him, she likes to paint the living room of her house. She has lost count of the number of times she has painted the living room. She has been seeing him a dozen years. There must be a dozen dozens of layers of paint, a gross of layers. How many layers will it take to contract the volume of the room, to build up, to fill in the in of the room? She likes to stay with the neutral colors, the whites and all the off-whites, the grays, and the other grays. Other colors bleed through the new paint, taking too long to cover, needing too many extra coats to cover. The paint’s been rolled on here in this room or maybe sprayed. He is moving faster and his hands have left her breasts and moved to her hips.

And in the mix, she thinks she sees, some sparkle, a mica fleck. At least it isn’t paper with its patterns and seams. Her husband never asks why she paints the living room over and over. He compliments her on the room once it is done as she washes the brushes in the sink, asks her if he can move back the furniture. Her lover likes to make love to her after she has made love to her husband. She doesn’t ask him why.

The color of come, she thinks, is the color of this wall, the wall she is looking at as her lover finishes behind her, inside her. It lacks the pearlescence of semen though, cloudy nacreous mix of light and its reflection, the wet paint sheen that encapsulates the flat depthless milt beneath the shiny marble glass skin. She likes to watch it dry. The paint too. She sits for hours in the living room, after she’s finished painting it once again, to watch it take on its color, steep and deepen. Sand. Stone. Marble. Mountain. She imagines that a woman somewhere thinks of the names for all the grays, a kind of poetry. Now, he tells her when he is about to, stops, holds still, then does,

Sand. Stone. Marble. Mountain. She imagines that a woman somewhere thinks of the names for all the grays, a kind of poetry. waits, waits, waits then slides out of her.

She lunges away, disconnects, no longer up on her toes, collapses forward, falls onto the wall as if the wall emits its own gravitational pull. She’s drawn in, adheres. She presses her whole body along the wall, flattens herself against it, wants to pass right through it into the next room. She turns her head to the side to feel its cool color, feel its pallor, the pigment rub off on her breasts, her belly and thighs, her flushed cheek.

Mt. McKinley 32-V-3 At the first session of each new Congress the representative from President McKinley’s home district in Ohio rises to take the floor and introduces legislation to retain the mountain’s appellation, preventing it from being renamed Denali for another two years.

The measure is accompanied by additional remarks concerning the mountain to be read into the record.

The mountain’s gray silhouette indicates two major summits, twin peaks, the southern one being the highest, and reveals a massif with a melodramatic ridgeline of lesser ascending and descending slopes out of which flow four major glaciers, variations of the same denouement.

On a ridge near the summit of Denali the Japan Alpine Club has established a meteorological observatory that was donated to the university. The weather station is one of only two such devices in the world located above 18,000 feet. Japanese newlyweds consummate their marriages at lodges in the shadow of Denali as the Northern Lights, the aurora borealis, unfold overhead, in the belief that such conditions are fortuitous for the resulting pregnancies as well as therapeutic for those who have been unable, until now, to conceive.

Meanwhile, it is the spring solstice in Alaska. Each succeeding 24-hour period sees an additional five minutes of sunlight added to the day. As the northern hemisphere begins to tip toward the sun in spring, shadows lengthen in the folds found on the distant mountain. The serrated ridge of Denali holds onto the increasing sunlight the longest, an incision of the lengthening shadow 27

etched next to the crest line, rising up to the cloudless sky. The sharply defined horizon tilts south, soon to deny, by summer, the sun’s sunset.

The Edge of Night 32-V-4 She changes out of her painting clothes—a plaid flannel shirt and actual white—well once they were white—cut-off at the knees, painters pants—and catches herself in the mirror, pasted together in broad fields of skin. The parts of her body that were exposed as she painted, her hands and arms, her face and hair, her lower legs are splotched with gray paint. Dried, the paint has taken on the texture of the pores beneath it, scaled and creased and puckered where it has splashed on her elastic, sliding, scaling skin. Her skin is like the skin old paint generates when left in an old can, a pudding’s skin, the color and the medium separating beneath the rubbery suspended crust at the top, a fossil liquid. She rubs off what she can, the fine hair of her forearms snagging in the crumbs of erased paint. In the failing light, her body in the mirror reflects swathes of gray planes, swatches of gray strokes. A sheet of gray in her belly folds under at a jutting hipbone. The tops of her thighs race down her legs, V to the bright dollops of her knees. Her collarbones are cut-out scallops, sloughed epaulets of contracting light. She’s contracting too, flattening, an illusion. Over her shoulder, her shoulder blade fans out, ribbed with the weak pattern the window’s blind projects.

The weakening available light seeps in in the dusk. Paint on her skin picks up what’s left of the light, lights up, what gloss there is, the speckled constellation along the arm, a milky way of milky paint along the shin. Her forehead is a fresco, a wall, a whitewashed wall. Her left cheek has been redrawn, is disconnected from her face, slides down her chin. It is a kind of careless camouflage, this sloppy paint splatter in the dark. She is becoming hard to see. She can’t even see herself. She is breaking up, broken up, in bits. She has left her lover again. In the shower, the paint dissolves, peels. It is water based. She scrubs, likes the feeling, the exfoliation, flaying the same paint that in the living room downstairs is shrinking microns as it dries, to fit a new thin skim on the walls. For a long time she had thought that the Dutch Boy of the paint was the same Dutch boy of legend who patches a dam

with his finger and wondered what that had to do with paint. But she looked closely at Dutch Boy’s Dutch boy on the can. He sits there topped with the hat and bobbed haircut the blousy blouse and blousy pants and the wooden shoes holding up a loaded paintbrush like a torch. She supposes it is in a Flemish style, this Dutch Boy, all light and shadow. A brown study. In the shower, she imagines she is the girl on the saltbox in the rain, the salt girl running as the paint begins to run. With her finger, she draws through the beads of water adhering to the tiles of the shower stall. As the finger moves, the beads come together, streak and smear, follow the gesture she paints. She pictures a picture of a brushstroke made up of brushstrokes. The swipes of water shatter back into quivering beads. The shower steams.

She is made of salt or she is made of the color of salt and she dissolves and is dissolving in the rain, drains down the drain.

The Dutch Boy is painting, painting the long wall of the dike that divides the land from the Zuider Zee, the Zuider Zee that disappears in the Dutch distance. And now the thin layer of soap she has applied to her body the color of the color of—but in this light it is hard to tell its color. It begins to peel in sheets as well. It runs. And as it drains, it assumes the spiral habit it has as it disappears in the shadows at her feet. She thinks: it will be that thin layer of paint that holds back that wall of all that water waiting to find its own true straight level.

Michael Martone latest books are Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a book of essays; DoubleWide, his collected early fiction; and Michael Martone, a memoir done in 40 contributors notes originally published in the contributors’ notes sections of various magazines. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

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BOMB Magazine’s 4th Fiction Contest —Judged by: Jonathan Lethem —PRIZE: $500 & publication in Fi t Proof —deadline: April 15 Reading Fee: $20 Includes a free one-year subscription to BOMB (overseas addresses should add $20); make all checks and money orders payable to BOMB Magazine.

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