Philadelphia Stories Spring 2009

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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

mitchell sommers

BANDO mary kate o’donnell

GOODBYE APOLLO dj kinney

I-80 tracy shields

LEAP YEAR author profile

MARC SCHUSTER

S P R I N G

2 0 0 9

I S S U E

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c o n t e n t s ART 6 Leap by Jayne Surrena. Jayne is a Philadelphia

FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

native who has been actively showing her art since she graduated from the University of the Arts in 2006 with a BFA in painting. She has recently returned to UArts to receive her masters in Art Education.

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

CONTENTS FEATURES 3 Bando (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mitchell Sommers 12 Goodbye Apollo (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mary Kate O’Donnell 15 I-80 (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DJ Kinney 24 The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl (novel excerpt) . . . . . . . . . Marc Schuster 26 Leap Year (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tracy Shields 28 Staying in Trouble (column) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aimee LaBrie

8 Brooklyn Bridge by Greg Lamer. Greg graduated from Montclair State University. He currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri where he sells books and takes photographs of people and buildings.

10 Wayne by Corey Armpriester.

A native Philadelphian, Corey Armpriester grew up in a military family bringing new places, people and influences frequently into his life. At the age of fifteen, photography became his medium of his expression.

POETRY 7 9 11 14 16

A.M.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Leonard Gontarek Staying in Place. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Carol Dorf Putting Up Peaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Dee Dee Risher Glory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Alan Hoey Before the Wedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Renee Emerson

12 Who Do You Think by Kristen Solecki. Kristen is a freelance artist and a recent graduate from the University of the Arts where she majored in Illustration. View more of her work at www.kristensolecki.com.

15 Blue Mist by Lee Muslin. (see bio below)

LOCAL AUTHOR PROFILE 23 Marc Schuster

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/Fiction Editor Carla Spataro Publisher/Managing Editor Christine Weiser Poetry Editor Conrad Weiser Guest Poetry Editor Pat Green Essay Editor Julia Chang Associate Fiction Editor Marc Schuster Director of Development Sharon Sood Production Manager Derek Carnegie Web Design Loic Duros 2

Editorial Board Courtney Bambrick, poetry Anne Buckwalter, fiction

Christine Cavalier, poetry Liz Dolan, poetry Jamie Elfrank, fiction Sandy Farnan, non-fiction Teresa FitzPatrick, fiction Denise Gess, fiction Emily Gill, fiction Pat Green, poetry Joanne Green, fiction Matt Jordan, non-fiction Cecily Kellogg, poetry Aimee LaBrie, fiction Nathan Long, fiction Walt Maguire, fiction Patricia Mastricolo, fiction George McDermott, poetry Harriet Levin Millan, poetry Elizabeth Mosier, fiction Julie Odell, fiction Ryan Romine, fiction John Shea, poetry & non-fiction Janice Wilson Stridick, fiction Michelle Wittle, fiction

17 Untitled by Nicole Koenitzer.

The beautiful areas around her home near Philadelphia inspired Suzanne Comer to use digital photography as an art form. See more work at http://comersuz.home. comcast.net/

19 Repose by Suzanne Comer. The beautiful areas around her home near Philadelphia inspired Suzanne Comer to use digital photography as an art form. See more work at http://comersuz.home. comcast.net/

20 Guggenheim by Gary Koenitzer. Gary Koenitzer has been a full-time artist since he first showed his work at the 2004 Collingswood New Jersey May Fair. His work can be found at more than eight galleries in the region, and more than 300 private collectors support his work. See more at koartpro.com.

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Romance by Annalie Hudson. Annalie's work has been in various juried art shows in the Philadelphia area. Member of the Upstairs Studio Artists at PVAC in Phoenixville and featured artist at www.simplepleasuresgallery.com. Her new website is: www.annaliehudson.com.

Cover Art: Echoes of Nature #2 by Lee Muslin. Nicole utilizes found commercial multi-media to express her ideas of layered personalities. Much like us, Nicole’s “personalities” are shown through layers upon layers that reveal a larger frontal picture, where some layers are exposed and others are hidden. See more at www.koartpro.com.

Philadelphia Stories is a non profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through the magazine, and through education programs, such as writer’s workshops, reading series, and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists.

Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 and is managed completely by a staff of volunteers. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!

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BANDO here is a homeless man living in our house.

I can’t really complain, I suppose, since we walked away from the house two months ago, and when the gavel falls at the Lancaster County Courthouse in another ten days and turns it into the property of JeffFi Mortgage, it won’t be ours anymore. But until that happens, my wife and I are still on the deed, and it’s still our house, on what was our block, where our son played in the backyard with our dog Libby and our neighbors’ kids. We used to live here, in this house, on this block, in this development across from a retention basin where frogs make froggy noises at night. Hence Jeremiah Place: our developer thought naming the development after the old Three Dog Night song was the height of cleverness.

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But even though it is narrowly, technically, still our block, I’m not sure what to do about the homeless man living in our house.

That’s not entirely true. I do know what to do. I can call 911. Or I can call JeffFi, assuming I can ever get someone on the phone who isn’t from Bangalore and knows what to do when I call. Hell, I could just walk in the door. After all, I still have the key, since JeffFi was too stupid to change the lock even after I sent them two letters saying change the damn locks and winterize the damn house—it’s the middle of February, you asshats.

Just to clarify: I did not actually use the word “asshat.” It’s a word I learned from my 16-year-old son. But, given the circumstances, it seems to fit.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS It’s auction time again! We hope you can celebrate with us. This is a vital event for the survival of Philadelphia Stories. It’s not cheap printing a four-color magazine and giving it out for free. But, we don’t want it any other way, so here’s where you can help.

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Mark your calendar for our Spring Fling at the American Swedish Historical Museum in South Philadelphia on Saturday, May 9, 4-8 pm. Just $10 gets you in to enjoy food, drink, and the live music of three great local bands: Dan Fullerton, The Paul Sanwald Trio, and Beretta76.

Third, consider becoming a member of Philadelphia Stories. As little as $20 helps!

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Eight months ago two guys in khaki colored shirts and brown pants served Gwen the foreclosure notice at 9:15 in the morning. Gwen worked for County Children and Youth, and she’d been up all night, taking an abused child into custody. She’d not quite fallen asleep, and I had told her when our financial problems first started that nobody would ever be coming to the door like this, that I’d take care of it before things reached the level of sheriffs and courthouses.

When we’d received the first notice, the one that my lawyer called an “Act 91” letter, I tried minimizing its importance.

This was not easy, given the fact than an Act 91 was designed by the Pennsylvania Department of Banking to be written in a manner precisely so you will not minimize its importance. It’s meant to make you piss yourself.

b a n d o But I’m good. I brushed it off. So I figured I could do it again when she came to my office.

Here’s how that conversation went: “I almost hit a duck.”

“Gwen?”

“A duck. I almost hit a damn duck.”

“Gwen, what’s wrong?”

“You told me this wasn’t going to happen.”

I guessed this had something to do with the mortgage even before Gwen said that, but I didn’t let her know. Denial is a gas, a vapor. It seeps into everything if you let it.

“Talk to me. What’s the matter?”

I meant the exact opposite of that.

Don’t talk to me. I will only have to find some other form of emotional defense.

“We’re fucked. We’re fucked. We’re going to lose the house.”

When Gwen gets angry, she mixes crying and rage into one, mashed-up,

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superheated emotion. She tears up, but she doesn’t cry, exactly. No sobbing lamentations, not even understated sniffling. The cry does not move one inch beyond her tear ducts. At the same time, she shows me the serrated edge of violence. Maybe she’ll throw something.

Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll just slam shit around. Like the paper in her hand, thick with legal-sized documents folded to fit the letter-sized pleadings they were attached to, making the whole of it look thicker, plumper, and all the more intimidating—like its accusatory language couldn’t be contained on mere paper but needed to spill out and beat me up.

“We are not going to lose the house.

Jesus, Gwen, I work at a bank. I know how this goes. I know how this game is played.”

Which was true. I did know how the game was played. I knew we’d lose the house.

Now that we no longer live there, there’s no reason to drive past our house except anger or revenge. It’s not near any of my life’s touchstones anymore—not where I worked, not near the house we now rent, not near Jason’s school, not especially close to anything, really.

Which is why I’m surprised to see anyone living there in the first place.

I drive past, slowly but not too slowly, like a stalker whose heart isn’t quite in it. I had left the basketball stuff in the driveway, thinking that the ghosts of Jason and his friends might still want to shoot a round of H-O-R-S-E, but now the only thing there is a mid-80’s Buick.

So I pull up behind it and get out of my car, but then what? What do I do? What’s the protocol? I’ve been going to work earlier and earlier so Gwen won’t have to look at me, but for Squatter Guy I have no coping mechanism.

I stand by my car for maybe 45 sec-

m i t c h e l l onds. I fiddle with my BlackBerry, looking for some newish email to distract me.

Finding none and hoping it’s not because they cut my service, I put it back in my pocket and start heading towards the door, trying to walk very softly, then realizing that it’s still my house and I’m not the trespasser here.

I don’t go to the door, though.

Instead, I cut across the lawn, which is just starting to look unkempt, to the window. Squatter Guy has the blinds pulled down only half the way. I walk right up to the window. Torso up, I see a vague silhouette of a man, like the blinds are keeping him in a witness protection program. Torso down, gray sweats.

I stare at the window, waiting for him to pull the shades in either one direction or another. He doesn’t. I spend about 45 seconds like this then walk back to my car.

I had seen plenty of legal captions and documents before, but never one with my name on it. I’d always wondered what it would be like, but now I didn’t have to. I stared at the paperwork that Gwen had thrown on my desk moments earlier, reading that caption, over and over again: In The Court Of Common Pleas Of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Civil Action-Mortgage Foreclosure Charlotte National Bank, As Trustee Of Jefferson Financial Corporation, Asset Backed Pass Through Certificates, Series 2005R-7 Under The Pooling And Servicing Agreement Dated As Of September 1, 2005 Without Record

To Refinance It Because Housing Prices Always Go Up And Ha, Ha, Ha You Sucker, Lost That Bet Didn’t You, But So Did We Because We Sold That Mortgage, Then Sold It Again, And Now Jeff Fi Is In The Crapper Along With Everybody Else, So We’re Both In This Together, Aren’t We? Husband and Wife.

When we moved into the house in Jeremiah Place, Jason was nine, I had just jumped from residential to commercial, and Gwen was working as a sales rep for a company that sold used construction equipment. She drove to various places in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland, often wearing her trademark hard hat with a Hello Kitty decal on the front. She made more money than me, more money than any of the men who were sales reps at her company, and, with all that, we could finally afford a really great house.

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Two years later, she was back at school, finally completing her Bachelors Degree at Millersville, then driving back and forth to Temple to get her Masters, all so she could work more hours for less money—way less, gaping chasms less—doing what she really wanted to do, which was to rescue kids with cigarette burns on their genitalia in the middle of the night.

I could have had a conversation with her back then. I could have pointed out that we’d purchased a whole lot of house.

That we needed her money to afford it.

That what she wanted to do didn’t make sense unless we sold the house, took the equity we had, and put a really big down payment on a smaller place. It’s what the lending officer in me would have done.

Here’s the thing, though. The socially unacceptable secret. There aren’t many ways to randomly display testosterone when you’re a middle-aged loan officer with bad knees and a receding hairline.

But they do exist. In my case, those ways

Vs. You, Seth Weinstein And Gwendolyn Weinstein, Deadbeat Losers, Who Took Out Too Much Loan Than You Could Possibly Afford And You’d Have Known That If You’d Have Not Had Your Heads Up Your Ass And Actually Looked At The Adjustable Rate Which Was Going To Go Up To 9.5% On A $388,000.00 Mortgage But You Figured You’d Be Able

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b a n d o involved home equity loans. And credit cards. And refinances. And credit cards again. Debt was great. Debt was wonderful. Debt allowed me to be both stoic and supportive.

Debt rocked.

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I leave early again. Gwen doesn’t ask why. She’s in the kitchen, pouring cranberry juice. Jason—I’m not sure where Jason is. In his room, maybe, with the boxes from the move still mostly filled with stuff. Gwen kept telling him, halfheartedly, to unpack them before she finally gave up. Only the computer and the Game Boy have seen light. The sheriff’s sale is nine days away.

I drive from this house that I rent—a house that I will not call “our house,” or “my house,” not yet, not today, not tonight—and pull to the end of this development, which doesn’t have fullgrown trees. Granted, my old development didn’t have full-grown trees, either.

But here I notice and resent their shortness, their lack of maturity. There’s lots to resent here, including the fact that I took this place so Jason would graduate next year in his same school district and on his same basketball team, and I thought I’d get some kind of credit for that.

I am about to confront a strange man in a familiar place. I pull up in the driveway. This time, if there are any ghosts still here, I imagine my tires rolling over them, cracking their incorporeal bones. I get out of the car. I consider honking the horn, announcing my presence, but decide against it. I don’t need to announce my presence. This is still my house.

I then notice that Squatter Guy’s car is not in the driveway. Or maybe I noticed it subliminally, as I was pulling in, and the thought that nobody would be there to confront me made me fearless. Regardless, I’m here. I pull out my key, wondering if it will work. It doesn’t.

I stand in front of my door, hovering between panic and rage.

Then I turn the doorknob without

Leap by Jayne Surrena © 2009

m i t c h e l l thinking. It opens. I’m in my house.

Again. Still.

There is furniture in my house. Not mine. A loveseat by the wall where my bookcase used to be—greenish, worn, kind of velvety. A thirteen-inch TV-VCR

combo, early 90’s vintage from the looks of it, sitting on a wooden chair—also greenish, but with some sort of yellow in the paint mix. A coffee table, oddly placed closer to the TV than the loveseat. Recent copies of People and

A.M. Leonard Gontarek I think Death will come when my face is wrapped in warm towels in a barber shop.

We will exchange witty, brilliant,

noir chit-chat and comebacks in the delicious, ambiguous moments of postponement

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Sports Illustrated, and a not-quite-recent copy of, what, The Weekly Standard? What the fuck? Do I have a neo-con squatter here?

Into the living room. A card table, two chairs, both the same as the wooden chair the TV was sitting on. More magazines. Another People, a Rolling Stone.

Against a wall, two boxes, long and narrow—one lying on its side against the molding, the other vertical, its top resting where a picture of Jason hitting a three-pointer used to hang. IKEA boxes.

I look inside, trying to figure out what it’s supposed to look like when it’s assembled, but I can’t tell. It’s just a bunch of birch.

I start to look into the kitchen but stop. I am close enough to see a white refrigerator, but I don’t want to look further. I’m suddenly afraid of looking at his refrigerator magnets.

I leave my house. I try to lock the door behind me, fail, then run to my car.

before the inevitable and ineffable.

I will feel rich, at last,

elegantly dressed as a mobster.

One cool customer.

I will finally have shaved this damn beard.

Until then, birdsong slits

the fabric of morning and aromatic shadows spill on the trees and gold grass.

The coffee, black, hot, but not too hot, the way I like it.

Leonard Gontarek has lived in Philadelphia for twenty years. He has taught and presented hundreds of poets through reading series in the area. He is the author of St. Genevieve Watching Over Paris, Van Morrison Can’t Find His Feet, Zen For Beginners and Deja Vu Diner (Autumn House Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Joyful Noise! An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, American Poetry Review, Blackbird, BlazeVox, Pool, Fence, Field, and as a tattoo.

I’m worthless at work. I want to lash out at someone, but I am not a lash-out kind of guy. I have a software financing package on my desk, and some lease syndication deals that need attention, and I really wish I were a lash-out kind of guy.

It would help me, I think. I could do all sorts of rage. People would live in fear, trying to work around me, manage me, plan things so the rages didn’t happen, but, of course, none of those coping devices would work because I’d be as unpredictable as a tornado, a tsunami, a housing-price-fueled recession.

But none of that is true, so I settle for being useless. And if I’m going to be useless, I may as well be useless at my own house.

I get in my large, red, stupid SUV. There is a duck—one single, loveless duck—standing in front, staring at the grille. I honk the horn. I wait for the duck to honk back. He doesn’t. He just stares.

I honk again. Nothing. He is not moving. He just stands there in the parking lot, daring me to make him move. I could

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Brooklyn Bridge by Greg Lamer © 2009

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back out. There is no car in the adjacent parking space.

Instead, I inch closer. I think to myself I am playing chicken with a duck.

I smile at that thought. It’s the most confrontation I’ve had with any creature in months, maybe years. I kind of like it.

But only for a second. Then I start to feel something truly awful. I’d like to say it’s compassion for the duck, and revulsion at the thoughts I just had towards it. I know neither of those are it. I back out through the adjacent parking space, and I head to my house.

Today, I have it mapped out. I am going to confront this man. I have an outline, a plan of attack. I will grab something, something heavy and capable of

causing a body to gush blood, and stick it in the back of my car. I will pull into the driveway. If Squatter Guy’s car is in that driveway, I’ll box the little fucker in.

I will go inside. I will tell him he has to leave. I will not have to use the heavy object. Displaying it will be enough.

That and my forceful presentation. I am a peaceful guy, but I am capable of faking menace.

He will leave. I haven’t figured out what happens after that, but he will leave.

By the way, if you’re ever thinking of getting a homeless guy out of your abandoned house by force, cars don’t have crowbars anymore. I find this out when I go to check the trunk. Nothing heavy.

Nothing metallic and unforgiving. My

car knows me. It knows I have a cell phone and a Triple A card. Crowbars are only for bad movies now. I shut the trunk. I open it again, thinking I might have missed some other dense object, but no, not unless I want to throw a miniature spare tire at Squatter Guy. I shut the trunk again. If it were my old house, I’d look in the garage for something, but I don’t have a garage. I look in the back seat. There’s a clipboard. On the floor is a pen with no cap and a large paper clip. I think about fashioning them into weapons, then smile, then laugh, then abruptly stop laughing.

Just me. It will have to be just me and Squatter Guy. I am here. It is 11:30 in the morning.

m i t c h e l l In two hours, the county sheriff will ask if there are any bids to my house. The only one who will bid will be the bank’s attorney. A gavel will hit a wooden plate, not too firmly, not too softly, somewhere between a click and a pound, because there are 41 houses on the list today and a guy could get carpal tunnel if he kept swinging that thing too hard.

That’s okay. I don’t need two hours for this. I will be back at my office soon.

This will only be a long lunch.

I pull behind the old ’80s Buick. Right behind it. Practically grinding against its bumper. I walk away from the driveway, onto the grass, which is starting to look a little ragged.

I knock on the door.

I wait. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds.

I knock again, then hit the buzzer. I’d forgotten I had a buzzer. I never had to buzz my own door, I guess.

Seven, ten, fifteen seconds.

Buzzer again.

I hear muffled sounds, speaking, footfalls. The door opens. Squatter Guy is real. He is taller than me, which, admittedly, isn’t saying much. He’s younger, but not by much, either. More hair, less fat. Round-rimmed John Lennon glasses. T-shirt with the insignia of the Iowa Hawkeyes and blue gym shorts. As a Penn State grad, I have an immediate, visceral dislike of that. He doesn’t deserve to be wearing a Big 10 tshirt.

“This is my house,” I say, in a voice that may or may not be calm.

“Come in,” he says, in a voice that’s definitely calm. I resent that even more than the t-shirt.

I look around. He has started putting together some of the IKEA stuff, but it’s only partially assembled. I think it’s a bookcase. Or maybe an entertainment center.

“How long have you been here?” I ask him.

“A while, a while,” he says. I focus on the accent. Not Central Pennsylvania, not at all. A little bit Jersey, north but not

too far north. He sits down on the loveseat. “Do you want a tour?” He smiles. It’s not a nasty smile at all. That unnerves me even more.

“Look, this is my house. You don’t belong here.”

“You won’t either soon.”

I start to pull one of the empty wooden chairs towards the loveseat, but stop.

Instead, I take the thirteen-inch TV off the chair it’s sitting on, put the TV on the ground, and use that chair. “I want you to leave. Now.” “Aren’t you the least bit curious what the hell I’m doing here?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to ask.”

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“Why not?” He leaned back, practically being swallowed up by the loveseat in the process.

“This is my house. For the next 90 minutes, it’s my house. I want you out of it.”

“I’m not going. And you really can’t make me.” He has the same tone of voice I used when I was denying someone a loan. No, more than that; when I was denying a customer who was already into us, who needed more money, just a little bit more to cover expenses, a little extension on a line of credit, and I’d say no. We can’t. We just can’t. It’s not personal. Though I’d never say that last part,

Staying In Place Carol Dorf The way each intersection in a city where you’ve lived a while becomes layered with personal archeology The cafe that replaced a liquor store you avoided, and the friend (or lover) you broke up with there, and the way on the day of the big fire you passed this corner as she said, “no, this isn’t much, just grass in the hills.” Somehow in this place, even disaster passes into ordinary life: insurance, contractors.

Unfold the map of all the places you have ever worked, the colleagues you have run into, and the way they complain about some of the same people and some new ones you’ve never met, and you nod, like, of course, I get exactly how it is to sit at that desk, in that cubicle, and how it feels when that creep stands in the entry, leaning against both walls at once.

This is the prequel to moving to Honolulu or Prague, places full with narratives no one could expect you to know, but peaceful at the moment.

You choose someone else’s landscape to drink coffee in, while you observe the morning commute.

Before she went to college, Carol Dorf, had never been outside of the Philadelphia area, for more than 4 nights. Her house on Ninth Street has been torn down, and the one on Pleasant Drive was condemmed. Her poems have appeared in Fringe, The Midway, Poemeleon, New Verse News, Edgz, Runes, Feminist Studies, Heresies, Coracle, Poetica, Responsa, The NeoVictorian, Caprice and elsewhere. She’s taught in a variety of venues including Berkeley City College, a science museum, and as a California Poet in the Schools. She now teaches at a large, urban high school.

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because I was already condescending to them just by the denial itself.

I get up and walk towards the pile of IKEA wood. I grab a plank of something light colored and smooth, and begin smacking it in my hand. “Look, you’re trespassing. I want you out of here now.”

“I’m not going until the sheriff comes and changes the locks.”

Still no anger. Still no reaction.

God, I want to hit him first. I want to hit him with this goddamn Swedish wood. I want to crack his head open with Blaarg or Kräppi.

“I think you should leave,” he says in a voice that seems almost kind.

I swing the piece of wood, aiming for the television, but I have to aim low since I placed it on the floor. The mechanics of my attempt at destruction throw me off. I hit the side of the TV, not the tube. As my right knee buckles, I pitch forward, onto the top of the TV, into the coffee table, scattering books and magazines.

He grabs me while my head is spinning, and I’m still in a daze, not sure if he’s helping me up or throwing me out. I get my answer when he lifts me under my right arm, opens the door with his left and gently deposits me, standing, outside. I think I hear him say “I’m sorry,” but I could be wrong.

I crumple to the ground. I’m dizzy, and I notice blood coming out my nose.

I stay on the ground a while, a long while. I want to throw up, but I can’t. I want to cry, but I don’t. I just pant and gasp and stay down, down so far I don’t even notice a township police cruiser pulling up in the driveway, and a cop walking up to me.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“What?”

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

I look at the kid in front of me. Can’t be more than 23, 24. Tall, about 6’3”, he’s leaning over me, trying to figure out whether I’m a victim or a perpetrator.

Maybe I’m giving off the vibe of both.

“I’m alright. I just, well, tried to get

Wayne by Corey Armpriester © 2009

m i t c h e l l into my house.”

“What do you mean?” I sense a shift in the cop’s voice. I realize I’d better pull the threads of middle class respectability together quickly. I stand up, haltingly, with some imbalance and fuzziness, but I stand.

“This is my house. I left it. I’m being foreclosed on. Today. In about 45 minutes, it won’t be my house, since it’s going to sheriff’s sale. But I just wanted to look around one last time.” I feel some-

thing in my eye. I hope it’s dirt, and not tears. I pull out my driver’s license, showing him both the old address and the little slip of paper from PennDOT showing my new address. He glances at them, hands them back to me, and stares at me.

“Is there someone in that house?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We’ve been having a problem with people moving into foreclosed houses.

Bandos, they’re called. Short for abandoned.”

Putting Up Peaches Dee Dee Risher We sit at the kitchen table, conversation as random as the peaches we choose from the bushel basket.

Order does not matter— all will empty out in the end.

Our histories are grafted.

This summer alchemy we learned in the bone of our childhood: the fruit already garnered from glossy leaves and blue sky, aligned on weathered, paint-cracked sills to wait the ripe of now— yesterday too soon, tomorrow too late.

We handle the soft flesh gently, stripping ruby skins to gold, honey-streaming, summer-soft words, recounting piecemeal what may this year be said.

Our hands busy, there is always somewhere to look when bruises rise and the sweet juice at our wrists is salted with tears. These intimacies are as healed as ever they will be.

We do not offer one another condolences— we are that honest.

Knives in strong, firm hands, we bend to our work and the telling which this December will gleam gold and secret on the pantry shelf.

Dee Dee Risher is a writer and editor living in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. For several years she was an editor of The Other Side, an independent progressive Christian magazine. She is originally from South Carolina.

s o m m e r s

I didn’t realize I was part of a trend.

“Is there someone in that house?” he asks again. “Is that how you got hurt?”

I think for a moment. No, that’s not true. It’s not really thinking. It’s synapses reacting, firing madly and off-key.

“No. Nobody’s in there.”

“Then how come there’s two cars in the driveway?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. But there’s nobody in there.”

“Well, if you say there’s nobody in there, and it’s not going to be your house soon, I guess I’ll leave you here.” Pause.

“You sure I should go?”

“You can go. I’m okay. I just—well, I just got sick, looking at my old place, and I sort of passed out. I hit my head and passed out. I’m okay, though. You can go.”

And he does.

And I stay until he leaves. Then I get in my car and drive to the courthouse.

I walk through the metal detectors, and then over to the old, ceremonial courtroom where they hold the sheriff’s sales. I’d been here before, as my bank’s rep, telling the attorney how much to bid, how high to go. Now I just take up space in the back row, all scratched and bleeding and beat up. I wait for my house to go on the block. The bank bids its costs. Nobody else says a word. The sheriff bangs the gavel.

I don’t know what comes next.

As an attorney practicing consumer bankruptcy law in Lancaster, PA, Mitchell Sommers may be one of the few people in America to benefit from the economic policies of George Bush. Mitchell received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his law degree from Penn State Dickinson School of Law. He has had op-eds published in numerous Pennsylvania newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has had short stories published in Ellipsis and PHASE. He is currently fiction/nonfiction editor of Tatanacho, an online literary journal, and is working on a novel. He can be reached at sommersesq@aol.com.

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m a r y

k a t e

o ’ d o n n e l l

GOODBYE APOLLO

I

went to the beach in a blindfold today, because once you asked me to. I wore the scarf you chose for me by touch: the one I wore often. The same one I told you I loved, and never mentioned the garish pattern made me cringe. Tied around my eyes, I could not see the pattern any more than you could when you chose it. It was a fitting penance.

After writing nearly forty pages this morning, I needed to go out and get some air. No one opposed me. I could not stay in the house a moment longer.

The glaring hole in the line of books on the shelves marked the former resting

place of your Braille poetry. The furniture was rearranged. The pages of my manuscript stretched across the floor from my desk to the living room.

Guiltily, I turned to neaten the house.

But then I remembered it wasn’t necessary anymore. I was free. I was so selfishly free. No one would slip on the pages.

There was no dog to wrinkle them. The stereo remote sat on the kitchen table.

No one would complain. I could safely leave a dirty carving knife from dinner last night in the sink.

Every object oppressed me. Each change I have made since you left weighed on my conscience. I had tried

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Who Do Your Think by Kristen Solecki © 2009

to change; did I really try hard enough?

Maybe I am selfish. Maybe I pushed too much for what I wanted.

Your last morning here, when I finished work, I should have offered to read to you. I knew you hated the dry computer voice of your electronic reader, and that you got a headache from your headphones. I needed silence to write, so you had no opportunity to use the stereo.

But I wanted sun and wind. I didn’t feel like escaping from the pages of my own book to be imprisoned in someone else’s. So I suggested the beach, wheedling and cajoling while you stood firm. I pushed too hard. You raised your voice.

“If you want to go to the beach, I certainly can’t stop you. I wish you could see how it is for me. Go to your beach once the way I do; see how much you like it then.”

And then I made my last mistake.

Apollo, uneasy at our argument, barked loudly. Thoughtlessly, I crouched down and held out my hand. He walked away from you to receive the caress from me. I soothed him without thinking, sliding my tired fingers through his inky black hair.

You froze. I saw your discreetly grasping fingers register his absence. You knew what I had done. I made him my pet, depriving you of your guide. You could never forgive me that.

Some days I wish I hadn’t petted Apollo. I wonder how it would have been. Some evenings I fall asleep wishing I had conceded more, wishing that I had tried harder to change. But some mornings I wake up feeling liberated.

When I stepped outside the car, the heat baked me in a moment. Barefoot, I shuffled awkwardly to the cooler surface of the steps. The wood of the stairs crunched loudly, like when I spill sugar

g o o d b y e on the kitchen floor and am too busy to clean it up. You always told me I should be neater, and I did try. Stepping off the bottom stair was like landing on the moon: a bounce and a quiet “whooph.”

But if the sand is sugar, the moon is flour.

Or at least, that is what I imagine, but I do not know any astronauts to ask. The sugary powder beneath me shifted with each step, creating an unaccustomed strain from ankles to calves.

Coming around the dunes, the wind hit me like a punch, abrading my face with tiny stinging missiles. I kept walking, and after the first attacks, the wind became docile and refreshing. I heard a throaty chuckle, which became a series of staccato shrieks as the gulls swooped in. I smiled up at the hungry gathering that wheeled in the air above me. Each pass of a seagull intercepted the sunlight on my face, a shadowy caress.

Further down the beach, I caught the hiss and lap of liquid fire. The damp chill came seeping up from the sand between my toes. I flinched when I stepped into a slimy mound of seaweed. You always kept your shoes on at the beach, because you were afraid of fishing hooks and washed up syringes. Peeling it from my toes, I cast it aside like a discarded streamer, and approached the water’s edge. The sand changed to pebbles beneath my feet.

My heel was pricked by a sharp edge, but it was not the cast-off of some junkie. It was a shell. Groping in the sand, I picked up clam castanets, which I clacked together while improvising a flamenco dance. No one was there to laugh at me. The empty shells withstood the abuse for a few minutes, and then the last filaments were torn asunder. I held two halves in my hands and they stank of salt and decay.

Then, a roar! A hissing angry snake of water boiled around my legs, and numbed them instantly. I felt it shove past me impatiently, charging up the beach, and then return to flirt with my feet, trying to lure me into the ocean.

a p o l l o

Standing there I remembered that poem you loved, which was too long. “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. / I do not think they will sing to me.” They did not sing to me either, though I stayed all day, blind and alone.

I have a confession to make. The sunset was not the same when it was merely waning warmth on my skin, and I did not love it as I usually do. But I did not hate it either.

Mary Kate O’Donnell is a nineteenyear-old sophomore English and biology major at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. This is her first published piece.

Glory Allen Hoey and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

—Psalms 19:1

Sometimes, late night, the middle of January maybe, I get home, everything’s quiet, the cows aren’t in the pasture out back, all the lights turned off as far as I can see, the packed snow crunches underfoot as I step away from the car and slam the door, but not quite a crunch, almost a kind of squeak, it’s that cold, and then, cold as it is, I stand beside the car and lift my head to look up at the sky, not a cloud, a high wind’s blown the heavens clear, and all the stars are weaving the way I’d weave heading across the yard and up the stairs, the warm air, the faint trace of heating oil, the rumpled bed at the end of the hall, but now the stars dance their little dance and, my God, it’s cold, and I’m here, and that’s just about the best a man could ever care about.

Allen Hoey has published two novels and five collections of poems, most recently Country Music (2008). In 2009 he will publish a new collectionof poems and a mystery. He teaches at Bucks County Community College and directs the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program.

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@ RESOURCES FOR WRITERS AND ARTISTS @ n a m e

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a u t h o r

d j

k i n n e y

I-80 T

hey woke together at a rest stop on the interstate, car windows dimmed by frozen breath and through the glass, anemic blue dawn swelling over Wyoming.

She struggled out of the sleeping bag, wrestled with the nest of blankets and pulled at the door. She poured herself out into the empty lot and shuffled a few paces from the car before she buckled over a strip of grass and vomited. It slapped the ground and steam rose from it. The man got out of the car and went to her and put his hands on her shoulders to steady her, to hold her. She heaved again, just water and foam.

“Get your hands off me.”

“What can I do?”

“This isn’t your problem.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Drive. We shouldn’t have stopped.”

They got back into the beaten silver Saturn and pushed the blankets to the back seat, which was piled with unpacked clothes, some still on hangers, some tangled at the floorboards.

“Jesus, Peter. Why don’t you just hate me?”

He started the car, which struggled in the cold. The engine knocked and shuddered. He drove.

She slapped his hand away from the radio and it stung, and when he pulled away it made him swerve over the line, into the red gravel shoulder, which probably made her hate him all the more.

“Christ. Learn how to drive.”

“You hit me.”

“I hit your hand.”

“I was turning it off.”

“I’m listening.”

“There’s nothing to listen to, Annie.

It’s just Jesus radio. There’s nothing there.”

She folded her arms and turned to the window and was sullen for a while.

Blue Mist by Lee Muslin © 2009 “I thought they might say something about it.”

They were silent for a long time more, listening to AM static rise and fall because Peter was afraid to touch the radio and upset her again, and Annie was too proud to admit that she had been wrong and there was really nothing on the radio about this horrible thing that had happened. Just hallelujah. Just praise the Lord.

And so it was the End of Days through the long Wyoming desert.

Eventually, when the voices faded, Annie turned off the radio and there was only wind and the hiss of the road.

“This is crazy,” she said.

“Yep.” “Yep? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was agreeing.”

“Yep. Are you a fucking cowboy?”

He didn’t answer. He shifted and drove with one hand.

She didn’t look at him. “Which part?”

“What?”

15

I - 8 0 “I said this was crazy and you agreed.”

“Yep.” “Which part did you agree to?”

The road was empty and wide, and so he turned and stared at her. “All of it,” he said.

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

He turned back.

“And that isn’t an answer. Tell me what you think is crazy.“ “That there are no radio stations.

That we haven’t been through a town in sixty miles. There’s a storm coming and we don’t have anywhere to stay.

Everything.“ “What’s everything?”

“Everything that’s happened. Every goddamned thing, Annie. You and me.

New York. All of it.”

She nodded. That was enough.

Then it was back to the radio.

Annie hit scan and it rolled through the entire AM band without stopping. It started again and stopped on static. She switched to FM and hit a station.

Christian. Like everything.

The voice was rattled. It said, What

will become of the children?

There were coughs in the pause and shuffling papers.

In the final days when God’s wrath is descended over the Earth and the horsemen have strode among us. What will become of the children?

Annie drew back her hand.

Some say that children are the innocent, but God almighty, the child will pay for the sins of their fathers and death will befall them as it did the children of Pharaoh, and locusts will consume their flesh and flies will fill their eyes.

“Jesus Christ, Annie. Turn it off.”

“No.” Peter flicked his finger over the volume knob and the radio went dead. He looked at her and waited for her to scream or hit him again. But she was silent. And then tears came.

“I hate you,” she said.

“That’s probably true.”

“This is such shitty timing.”

“The worst.”

“We can’t have a baby now.”

He took his hand from the wheel and shifted it toward her. He put it on her leg, covered by the bloated down

Before the Wedding Renee Emerson I am on the front porch of a blue house, salting the ground with the corpses of spent cigarettes. I blow tendrils of smoke toward the leafy crops in the fields across the road, a sea greener than the sea, and my mouth tastes like ash, or like someone else’s mouth. The evening sun outlines the trees against the sky, and grit 16

and dirt is blown in from the cotton fields that have always seemed so far away.

Renee Emerson’s work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Keyhole Publications, Sojourn, and Decomp magazine. She is currently an MFA student at Boston University, and living outside the city with her husband and two cats.

coat, which he loathed, and had always loathed. She put her hand on top of his and they held each other this way while the long desolation passed outside, while miles of fences flickered by and the morning sun settled on the land like ash.

“I still love you,” he said. “I don’t know if that makes any difference, but I do.”

“It does.“ She squeezed his hand. “I don’t know why, but it does.”

Miles piled upon miles, and the exits were useless and barren.

“No Services,” he said as another sign slipped by.

“How can there be no services? How do people live here if there are no services?”

“I think they drive a long way for services.”

“Stop saying services.”

“Sorry.”

“Fuck this place.”

“We’ll find something.“ “Fuck you too.”

They were quiet for a while.

“I’m hungry,“ she said.

“Me too.”

“I mean it. I’m really hungry.”

“When we get to an exit, we’ll see if we can find some services.”

“Go to hell.” She folded her arms and leaned against the window. “Why didn’t we bring any food with us?“ “Because we were in a hurry. And yesterday I didn’t think we’d have trouble finding some.”

They did come to an exit, which wasn’t a town, just a clutter of lots and gravel to either side of the highway, two gas stations, a junkyard, and a McDonald’s.

It was a nameless settlement that had sprouted simply because one old local road rambled out of the country and crossed the interstate.

They came off the highway and crept to the top of the ramp, slick with

d j ice and snowblown. The car slipped and then caught the pavement again.

The station at the end of the ramp had put out orange barricades and a slab of plywood that said NO GAS. They turned left and the tires slipped as they moved onto the overpass and skidded down the other side.

At the other station, a long line of pickup trucks had stacked up at the pumps.

“There’s a McDonald‘s,” she said.

“You never eat that shit.”

“I need to eat. I don’t care what it is.”

The snow on the local road had gathered in eddies and he drove slowly over black ice where the tires had no

grip. He turned into the parking lot and turned off the engine.

“I don’t want to get caught in the storm,“ he said. “I think we can make it to Laramie before it hits. If we hurry.“ She nodded. “Yeah. Alright.”

They got out and the dry wind bit them. Snow blew around their ankles and packed in dusty drifts at the edge of the lot. They shuffled for the door.

Inside, it was yesterday in America.

Yesterday, when nothing had happened at all.

Annie ordered breakfast, but the kid behind the counter, an Indian with long black hair and bad skin, told her that it was too late, so she muttered under her

Untitled by Nicole Koenitzer © 2009

k i n n e y

breath and walked away. Peter ordered for her.

The kid disappeared into the back and Peter waited. The place was bright.

The place was warm. It was good to be warm after the bitter winter night at the side of the road.

Annie sat in a booth against the front window, staring at her open hands. She pulled off her dowdy knit hat and frazzled hair splayed out in wild directions.

When Peter had met her, she had been so prim and ordered. Her hair precise, her clothes immaculate, her body angelic.

But this had changed and she had become tangled and wrecked, as they together had wheeled wildly off the rails, and whatever they’d been once, they were no longer.

At the end, they cheated on each other ferociously, for vengeance, to push the other away, to disgust the other and bring the thorny bramble of their undone love to a permanent, fiery end.

And it had worked, and they had ended, squarely and without remorse.

Then on Monday came into their lives news of the baby.

Then on Tuesday came the end of the world.

The kid came back to the counter.

“Sorry it’s taking so long. A lot of people didn’t show up today.”

“It’s alright.”

“We don’t even got the guy that cleans the shitter.”

“Damn.”

“Just didn’t come in.” The kid looked around to see if he was being watched.

He leaned in and almost whispered.

“Hey. You heard anything?”

Peter shook his head. “No.” “They don’t let us turn on the radio or nothing. So I ain’t heard. But if you heard something—” “I haven’t. Sorry.“ “Okay. Yeah. I’ll bring it out to you in a minute.”

Peter left the counter and walked to the table by the window. He hung over

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18

Annie for a while. She looked up at him, regarded him, exhausted and confused, the same way she had looked at her hands. Perplexed by her appendages, baffled that he was still attached to her, and she to him.

He sat across from her. “I have a plan.”

She stared.

“We eat. Then we find gas. We can wait in line over there. Then if we drive all day, we can make it to Omaha. If we drive hard, we could make it to Chicago by tomorrow night. We’ll be there for Christmas. Everything will be okay when we get home.“ “That isn’t a plan, Peter. That’s just what we were doing anyway.”

“It makes me feel better to say it.”

The kid came over with a tray of Big Macs in their greasy boxes.

“Sorry it took so long. Some of ‘em might be a little fucked up because the guy who knows how to put them together on Tuesdays didn’t show up today, so I just guessed from the pictures.”

“It’s okay,” Annie said, which was unusually kind.

He lingered, then shuffled back to the counter.

There was honking. A lot of honking and Annie craned her neck to see over Peter’s shoulder.

“What is it?” He turned.

At the gas station, two men were scuffling. One pushed the other and a clumsy swing landed them both in a pile of snow.

From the passenger side of one of the fueling pickups, a woman dropped down, drunk and morbidly obese, shouting incoherent obscenity. While she ranted, she pulled the nozzle from the tank and dragged the hose to the opposite side of the pump island, dousing the truck that was parked there.

A couple of burley men tried to stop her, but they were driven off by a spray of gasoline to the eyes. They howled and scuttered away. She grabbed at one

of her breasts. She flipped her middle finger as the gas pooled around her.

Peter switched places at the table.

He sat next to Annie so he could watch.

The rest of the pickups in the line started to scatter, banging into each other, honking, jamming up against the wall of the station, against the pumps and islands, steel slapping steel and glass snapping.

The woman chased a few trucks to the extent of the hose. She turned circles and wrapped her legs in it. She fell, struggling, rolling in the gas. She untangled herself and stood and held a lighter to the grill of the truck.

One of the men in the snow, all battered now and dripping with blood, stood up and yelled. He might have been trying to reason with her. She couldn’t hear or didn’t care. She sparked the lighter and lit the pickup on fire.

The flames flashed back up her arm and burned the gas that had soaked into her sweatshirt. People ran from the tangle of trucks as fire chased out over the slicks that had gathered.

The woman screamed and ran and flailed her arm, but the fire jumped to her hair and covered her body. She set fire to the ground as she ran.

The next pickup in line caught fire.

The station was a roiling black cloud, a filthy billowing torch, all alight in the snowy morning.

The bloody man tried to stop the burning woman, but she was frantic and slapped at him, and some of the flame jumped across to his coat and his hair.

He tried to get away, but walls of fire rolled up from the pools on the ground.

He ran through it but was consumed and collapsed into the snowbank. The fat woman fell behind him and burned.

Annie had taken a bite of the Big Mac. She put it back in the box and pushed it away.

“Why is this happening?

“Why’s what happening?”

“You know what.”

“They’re fighting over gas.”

“Not that. All of it.”

“The usual reasons, I guess.“ Annie took the Big Mac and bit it.

She stuffed her mouth with it.

Peter felt the heat of the fire on his face through the glass.

He said, “If it would have happened a month ago, would we have broken up?

Do you think we would have been so terrible to each other?”

She worked pieces of food around in her cheeks as she thought. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“We need different things now.

Things are different.”

“What things?”

“We have new priorities.” She looked at him and wiped her mouth with a bunched paper napkin. “It changes everything.”

The glass rattled and rumbled. A broad and sucking bulge of fire rose up over the gas station.

“So what do we do?”

“We do what we have to. We make it work.“ “Wait,” he said. “Wait, are we talking about the bomb or the baby?”

She shook her head. “We’re talking about us.”

They left the place behind. The fire department never came. As they slid by the gas station, Annie pressed her hands over her eyes. The burned bodies stuck in Peter’s periphery like shadows, black and stiff against the snow which melted around them in the heat of the soaring fire.

They crept out onto the ramp and back to the interstate.

“We can make it to Laramie,“ he said.

“Don’t you think we should find gas?”

“Look at the gauge.”

“It’s on E.” “Exactly.”

“Exactly what? That means it’s empty.”

“No, it means we probably have sixty

d j miles left on this tank.“ “Sixty miles? It’s on empty, you asshole.”

“We’ll be fine, Annie.”

At the side of I-80, where the car had run out of gas, Annie paced along the muddy red gravel shoulder, clutching her hands and doubling over, and cursing in a way that kept her warm with hellfire.

Peter sat in the car and waited for her rage to pass.

“You stupid fuck!” She kicked the ground and a hail of gravel hit the car.

She turned and walked off.

On the crests of the rocky brown hills around them, pumpjacks nodded in slow succession, draining oil from the earth, scattered across the washes and ridges.

He watched her walk away and thought, as terrible as she was, as bad as they had been to each other, she was the most important thing left in the world.

He opened the door and called after her. She stopped and turned back.

“What are we going to do, Peter? We don’t have any gas.”

“We’ll wait for somebody. We’ll wait for a car.”

“There are no cars. There’s a storm coming. Nobody’s driving except us.”

“We’re not driving either, actually.”

She bit down hard.

“It’s warmer in here,“ he said. “Just get in the car.”

The storm did come, and it consumed them.

They sat together in the back seat on their clothes, bundled under sleeping bags and blankets. The car rocked and shuddered in the wind.

The last pale sun came through the deepening snow on the glass, blue and icy light.

“There’ll be a plow through soon. Or maybe highway patrol. We’ll be fine.”

“It’s getting dark.”

“It’s just the snow on the windows.”

“No. It’s late. The sun’s going down

and it’ll get colder.”

“We’ll be alright. We can still make it to my mom and dad’s tomorrow night.

We’ll have Christmas. It’ll be normal.

Everything will be O.K. when we get home.”

“It isn’t fucking normal.“ “I’m glad you’ll get to meet them.“ “Were you ever going to introduce me?”

“Of course.”

“When? We’ve been together for eight months.”

“They live fourteen hundred miles away.”

“You could have figured something out.”

k i n n e y

“What about you? I’ve only met your mother once, and she lives in Vegas.”

“Once is enough for anyone.”

“I liked her.”

“That’s because you were both drunk and disgusting.”

Annie shifted and brought herself closer to him. “Do you think she’s alright? Do you think she’s safe?“ “Definitely. She’s on vacation.”

“So?” “She’s out of the country. I’m sure everything’s fine in Europe.”

She put her head on his shoulder, heavy and smelling of wool and sweat.

The ridiculous ball on top of her hat tickled his cheek.

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Repose by Suzanne Comer © 2009

I - 8 0

Guggenheim by Gary Koenitzer © 2009

20

“What if they don’t like me?”

“They’ll like you.”

“But what if they don’t? Or what if I don’t like them?”

“Annie, everybody is going to like everybody else. Everything is going to be fine.”

“But that isn’t true, is it.” She slid her arm behind him and held him.

“Everything isn’t going to be fine.”

“Things will be different, that’s all. It might get harder for a while, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be bad. It doesn’t have to be.”

“Are you talking about the bomb again?”

“No. The baby. Weren’t we talking about the baby?”

“I’m cold,” she said. “Do you want to make love?”

“What?”

“Do you?”

“I didn’t know that was still an option.”

“Well, it is.”

“Then yes. Yes, I do.”

They did make love, with their clothes mostly on and swaddled in blankets. The windows gathered fog, which froze and glowed in the dusk.

When they had finished, and all of the light had gone out of the sky and the snow that covered the glass had gone dark, they sat together and thought of home.

Sound came from behind them. A slow vibration in the ground became a shudder and a quake. The growl from the highway became a torrent of raging engines and rattling steel.

“Jesus, what is it?” She sat up and scratched at the ice on the rear window.

Headlights burned through the

snow and filled the car. Peter wrestled with the blankets and pushed his shoulder against the door to break the seal of ice that had formed. Clumps of snow fell over his freezing hands.

Standing in the gravel with his back to the wind, he watched the tanks pass with armored trucks and Humvees heading south. The headlights on the highway snaked back along the road for miles.

Annie climbed out, still wrapped in her blanket. They watched the convoy pass, too loud to speak over the whistling and growling and screaming of machines.

Annie waved her arms. She moved closer to the road, but none of them slowed.

Eventually, when the end of the convoy came, and the road was silent, a few military semis brought up the rear. A tanker passed, and another pulled to the shoulder and stopped behind them, flooding the place where they stood with light.

The engine rattled and knocked.

The driver dropped down.

“Are you in need of assistance, ma’am?” The soldier jogged toward them with hands deep in his coat. “They called back and said you were trying to flag us down.”

“We ran out of gas,” she said. “What’s happening?”

“Gas? Not a problem.” He turned and shouted into the light. “Diaz. Grab a gas can.”

The passenger door opened and slammed and there was a shuffling in the gravel.

“What’s going on?” Peter said.

“Can’t say.”

“Do you know anything about New York?”

“Really can’t say.”

The other soldier hustled toward them lugging a brown plastic gas can.

She was small and wore thick glasses.

Peter had to pry the frozen gas tank door with a key.

d j He twisted off the cap and the soldier started to pour.

“Where are you two headed?” she asked.

“Home,” Peter said.

“Where’s home?”

“West of Chicago.”

“How far west?”

“Suburbs.”

She nodded. “Where you coming from?”

“Salt Lake.”

“You picked a very bad time to take a very long road trip.”

“We’re going to see his family for Christmas,” Annie said.

“Have you spoken to them?”

“We couldn’t get through.”

The soldier who had been driving scraped his boot in the dirt. “No one can,“ he said. “Are you married?”

“No,” Peter said.

“You two should get married. Make it right in the eyes of the Lord.”

Annie took Peter’s hand.

“So,“ he said, “you planning to take I80 all the way?”

“Yeah,” Peter said.

“Well, maybe when you get to Des Moines, you should quit the interstate.”

“Why?” Annie squeezed harder.

“I think you might find the old U.S....uh, the old U.S. highways a more scenic way to travel.”

“We’re kind of in a hurry.”

“Then you better quit the interstate at Des Moines. You follow?” He stepped closer. “This thing ain’t over, brother. Do yourself a favor and stay off the highway.”

He turned and headed back to the truck.

The other one finished with the gas can and put the cap back on the tank.

“I don’t know what kind of mileage you get, but that should get you to Cheyenne. You can find gas there.”

“Why are you doing this?” Annie said.

“We‘re just here to serve, ma’am.”

“That isn’t true.”

The soldier stood for a while, quiet and staring, the last of the snow falling between them.

“Sins,” she said.

“What?”

“It was Jackson’s idea. To make up for the sins we gotta go do now.”

“Diaz! Let’s roll.”

“What sins?”

The soldier turned away and jogged back to the truck.

“What fucking sins?”

“Annie, shut up.”

“Why?” “I don’t know. Just shut up.”

The engine growled and knocked and the truck rattled back onto the road, heading south.

They stood alone in the dark at the roadside, smelling ice and sage, silent for a while. Too long.

“Start the car,” Annie said. “I’m cold.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I’m cold,” she said. “I love you, too.”

They sang. They were beset by the madness that comes on long ribbons of American road. They sang through the snarled and snowblown streets of Cheyenne, they sang through the last of Wyoming and six more hours into Nebraska. They told stories about their lives all the way to Omaha.

They laughed and were giddy and then fell into silence in a 24 hour WalMart parking lot which bustled and hummed through the night as lines backed out of doors for generators and palettes of bottled water and Band-Aids and all of the other things that had suddenly become the stuff of life.

They slept in the white glare of mercury vapor lights and in the morning Annie was sick again before they set out at dawn.

Civilization began to coalesce along the road, exits with new frequency, populated by chain restaurants and big box stores.

The radio, which had possessed her the day before, was silent. They had decided, without saying so, that neither

k i n n e y

cared to know what new and terrible things had happened to the world in the night. All they needed to know of that came from emergency vehicles flickering past and clusters of military trucks at intervals on an otherwise vacant highway.

At the edge of Des Moines, she said, “You never asked me what I was going to do.”

She fiddled with the vents and the heat controls.

“Do with what?”

“If I was going to keep it.”

“I just assumed.”

“How could you assume something like that?”

“I don’t know. I just did.”

“You were right. I just mean that I’m curious. That’s all. Why did you think that?”

“It was the way you said it.”

“How did I say it?”

“You didn’t say, I’m pregnant. You said I’m having a baby.“ She shook her head. She flicked off the heat. “No, I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“No I didn’t. I said we‘re having a baby.“ And that was true. She had.

They came to signs that warned of a roadblock. Not the usual orange construction fare, but olive and white military signs which were clearly not suggestions of caution, but statements of very serious intent.

They left the interstate, off onto the snowy, vacant surface streets of the suburbs. The soldier in Wyoming had told them to quit the interstate, and from an overpass, they saw why.

A tangle of trucks and flickering lights scattered across cordons. Semis were being searched, minivans turned inside out. An entire living room had been assembled on the side of the road from a moving truck that was being taken apart.

Lamps and sofas and an oversized television in proper arrangement in the snow.

On old U.S. Highway 30, things

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I - 8 0

22

were clear. The wind had kept the snow off the road, blown into drifts and culverts.

They drove all day through old America, town after tiny town forgotten when the interstate had opened and sucked away what traffic had flowed through these old veins. And surrounded by wide, white fields were main streets lined by storefronts, now vacant, and other streets that crept off to the edges, shaded by broad old oaks that covered dignified, forgotten houses.

The sun fell behind them and winter dusk came early again, and then finally they came to the Mississippi and Illinois beyond.

They stopped so that Annie could piss.

There had been no town for miles, and there wouldn’t be for miles more, and even when they found one, nothing would be open. So this place was as good as any.

She walked away from the road, crunching snow out into a field. Peter leaned against the car and looked down the road, out into the strange silver dark, which wasn’t dark at all. The light of unencumbered stars and sliver of moon on the snow which had gathered against the broken stalks of harvested corn, and in the still he heard in the air a river of traffic from the interstate, two or three miles away, a brief stretch of reprieve, unhindered by barricades after Davenport.

It was this way that he remembered home. Still and perfect in winter, the smell of snow, if there was such a thing, and the rush of traffic somewhere out in the dark.

And then a light swelled in the sky.

The sky went blue like day. Annie was forty feet away, squatting in the field in sudden noonday. She fell backward and scrambled to her knees and then the light faded. It drew back across the sky, painting stars again as it receded to the east.

He heard Annie struggle in the snow, then saw her again, jogging toward the road.

“What the fuck? Peter, what was that?”

He listened.

“Peter?”

He listened and watched the sky, but there was nothing. She moved forward and fell into him. He held her, squeezed her in his arms. She was shaking.

He had stopped counting by thousands when the sound came, a low roar a minute late, which was the end of Chicago.

They drove and said nothing.

They drove until the places they passed by and through became familiar to him, became places he had been before, roads he had driven once, roads he had crossed twice, and then places that he called home.

They stopped in front of his house, which was an average sort of American house in an average American suburb, part of the sprawl pressing fingers out into the fields.

The lights were still on. That was good. Strands of Christmas lights lined the eaves and angles. A tree glimmered in the window. The lights wouldn’t stay on forever, but tonight at least, they were bright, and they were home.

A woman came to the glass and cupped her hands over her eyes to see outside.

“Is that your mother?”

“Yep.” “Fucking yep. Honest to God.” “Don’t be nervous.”

“I’m not nervous. I’m scared.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

They got out of the car and walked together toward the house. His mother disappeared and he could hear her yelling to his father somewhere inside.

To the east, the sky was burning red, and at its edges, orange light broke through strange clouds, all black and scattered out over the horizon.

A breeze had swelled toward them, but it would shift by morning. He was sure that it had to. He was sure of it.

“Everything’s okay now,” he said.

“We’re here.”

“Yes,” she said. “We’re here.”

“We shouldn’t stay outside though.”

“No. We shouldn’t.”

“Come in.”

She took his hand. She squeezed it.

They walked together out of the cold and into the house.

DJ Kinney is the author of The End of Oranges, an unpublished collection of short stories which examines themes of love and calamity under difficult, often surreal circumstances. Stories from The End of Oranges have been published in Eureka Literary Magazine, Eclipse, Puckerbrush Review, Allegheny Review, Vincent Brothers Review and others. DJ lives and works in Portland, Oregon with his miniature dachshund John R. Crichton, Jr.

a u t h o r

p r o f i l e

By Jamie Elfrank

MARC SCHUSTER will make us feel good. I see a real connection between buyer’s remorse and the crash that follows a cocaine high, for example. So we keep coming back for more. This really says something about how we really intuitively understand that we want the products in our lives to make us feel good.

For Audrey, turning to drugs makes about as much sense as turning to some other product might make to someone else.

Coke gives her energy, makes her feel sexy, and helps her tackle all of the overwhelming chores she faces on a daily basis. Who wouldn’t want that? And what household product doesn’t ultimately promise that? Of course, the promises of all of these products, like that of cocaine for Audrey, turns out to be empty in the end.

The subj e ct ma tte r of WMPG is obvi ousl y da rk, a nd ye t the re a re ma ny mome nts of le vi ty wi th a wi de ra nge of col orful cha ra cte rs. How di d you ma na ge to ba l a nce the tone ?

Local author Marc Schuster sat down with us to discuss his upcoming novel The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl (PS Books, May 2009). The tale centers on Audrey, a woman who struggles with issues of addiction and romance. The novel offers a darkly comic look at consumerism and the ideal of perfection.

Wha t i nspi re d you to wri te WMPG? The novel grew out of a short story I wrote when I was a member of a local writers group. At one meeting, the assignment was to write a short story about an obsession, and I took the liberty of changing “obsession” to “addiction.”

Everyone found the premise of a level-headed mom sliding into an addiction seductive, but the overwhelming consensus was that it needed development. I took it as a sign that what I had on my hands was actually a novel in its earliest stages.

Why choose drug a ddi cti on to e xhi bi t the conse que nce s of the doubl e sta nda rd soci e ty puts upon Ame ri ca n woma n?

I almost see drugs as the ultimate consumer product. The promise of every product that’s marketed to us is that that it

Most of my favorite writers strike this balance, so I had many wonderful examples to follow. One of the reasons Kurt Vonnegut is so great is that he simply points out the more ridiculous ironies of life. To some degree, that’s what I was trying to do in WMPG. For example, I think it’s interesting that we’ve evolved in such a way that pretty much anything that makes us feel good will kill us. The other part of the equation is respecting the characters. Audrey is a sharp and witty person with a keen eye for irony. Since the story is told from her point of view, it’s only natural that she’s going to pick up on all of the ridiculous things that happen around her—everything from the bizarre efforts of characters like Captain Panther to keep kids off drugs to her seven year old daughter’s strange fascination with haute couture. It’s tough to have your wits about you in this world and not see that much of what we do is incredibly absurd.

Do you ha ve a ny signings/re a di ngs pl a nne d?

I have a couple lined up at Rosemont College—with their literary magazine and through the Rosemont Writers’ Retreat, where I’ll be teaching this summer. I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop on May 22. I’m also reading in September at Montgomery County Community College. Anyone who wants me to read or meet with their book club can get in www. ma rcschuste r. com touch through my website—w

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m a r c

s c h u s t e r

THE SINGULAR EXPLOITS OF WONDER MOM & PARTY GIRL (NOVEL EXCERPT) he mail arrived while I was on the phone with Roger.

“Is it a date?” he asked.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.”

Catherine and Lily were doing their homework at the kitchen table, so I was careful not to say the word date out loud.

Meeting, yes. Rescheduled, certainly. Friday night, mostly harmless. But a word like date, with the questions it begged and the baggage it carried, was better left unspoken.

“Friday night? Dinner? His treat, I’m guessing? Sounds like a date to me.”

“I didn’t call to get your opinion,” I said. “I called so you’d come for the girls on time.”

“Are you kidding? I always come for the girls on time.”

“You frequently come for the girls on time,” I said as the mailman cut across my front lawn with a brown paper package in his hand. “And occasionally you make them wait for an hour.”

“Okay,” Roger said. “I’ll send Chloe.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“It isn’t a problem. She doesn’t mind at all.”

“She’s not the one I’m worried about.”

There was a knock at the door, and Catherine looked up from her math homework. Her books were all open and stacked in front of her, the spine of each resting neatly in the crease of the one below. The glance that passed between us said she’d rather not be bothered by petty concerns like accepting deliveries from the mailman or the logistics of moving between one parent and another, but Lily was more than eager to leap from the drudgery of her phonics work-

T

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book to whatever adventure lay between the kitchen and the front door. When her wide emerald eyes asked for permission to leave the table, I nodded, adding in the unspoken language of mothers

and daughters that she better make it quick.

“So what do you know about this guy?” Roger asked as Lily returned with the spoils of her short but triumphant

the

singular

exploits

journey. “Where does he live? What does he do? What kind of car does he drive?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter because this isn’t what you think it is.”

Lily showed me the package. It was addressed in my mother’s letter-perfect script. Since the divorce, she’d been sending me self-help books like clockwork, so it wasn’t a stretch for me to assume that this was one more in a long list of titles selected, above all, to remind me that my marriage had failed: Surviving Divorce, Divorce and the Working Mother, The Spirituality of Divorce, Divorce for Beginners, Divorcing for Good, and my personal favorite, Divorced and Loving It: The New You Guide to Life without Him. Sure, they were trite and completely unreadable, but who was I to deny my daughter the joy of opening a brown paper package sent with uncompromising love from her grandmother in Maryland?

“Can I?” Lily asked.

I gave her a nod. She tore at the package with greedy fingers. As the paper fell away to reveal yet another selfhelp volume, Lily cocked her head in a gesture of confusion and curiosity.

Following her gaze to the lipstick-red letters that spelled out the book’s title, I took in a sharp breath and told Roger that I had to go.

“What is it, Mom?” Lily asked as I reached out to revoke her prize.

“Nothing,” I said. “Grandma made a mistake.”

“Oh,” Lily said. “What’s master… master?”

“God,” Catherine groaned, looking up from her homework once again as Lily sounded out the one word I didn’t want her to see.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s an adult topic.”

“Does it have to do with divorce?”

Lily asked as Catherine covered her ears.

“No,” I said. “Yes. A little bit. It’s a mistake is all. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Is it sex?”

of

wonder

“I’m leaving,” Catherine said. “I’m gathering my books, and I’m walking out of the room.”

“It’s sex, isn’t it?” Lily said as Catherine broke into a mortified run.

“You can tell me if it is. I know all about sex.”

“You’re seven,” I said.

“I’m very mature for my age.”

I blamed television. I blamed the internet. I blamed the world we live in.

Most of all, I blamed myself.

The book in question was called Singular Pleasures: The Womanly Art of Masturbation, and when I called my mother to ask if she’d lost her mind, she explained in measured, even tones that masturbation was a perfectly natural option for a woman in my position to consider.

“My position?” I asked.

“Divorced,” my mother said. In addition to plying me with self-help books, she had a habit of sending me newspaper clippings chronicling the accomplishments of boys I’d known in grade school.

Andy Gumble, who used to eat paste, was a gynecologist now. Chucky Friel, who once stole a case of beer from our neighbor’s garage, was a district councilman. Danny Brooks, who was suspended for setting off firecrackers in the gym, was opening a pretzel franchise in Havre de Grace. Single? My mother asked on a three-by-five index card stapled to this last item, her query already pregnant with disappointment. “I assume you’re still not seeing anyone.”

“No, Mom, but I don’t think I have to resort to that.”

“Masturbation?” my mother said. “It’s just a word, Audrey. You don’t have to be afraid of it.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“Then say it with me. Masturbation.”

“I’m not having this conversation.”

“Women have certain needs,” my mother insisted. “And believe me, we don’t need men to fulfill them. Take your father and me, for instance.”

“Mom, could you please stop talking?”

mom

&

party

girl

“Let’s just say he’s not the man he used to be.”

“I’m hanging up now, Mom. Goodbye.”

My mother started to elaborate upon my father’s sexual dysfunctions, and I broke the connection between us. If I had time, I’d call back and apologize, but there was dinner to make, and Lily was still brooding over my refusal to discuss a certain singular topic with her.

“Are you ever going to get married again?” she asked later that night as I put a plate of mushy ravioli in front of her.

“Because dad says you’re the kind of woman who doesn’t need a man.”

“He said that?” I asked.

“He was just kidding,” Catherine assured me, refusing to make eye contact as she poked at her dinner. Magnets held last year’s tests and report cards to the refrigerator. Before the divorce, she’d been a solid B student. Now all she did was study, and her grades were nearly perfect. I worried that she was trying too hard to please. I worried that she was trying to earn my love. “He says a lot of things he doesn’t mean.”

“But Chloe says everybody needs somebody,” Lily said, picking up where she left off. “She says all you need is a little makeover, and guys’ll go wild for you.”

“Shut up,” Catherine said through gritted teeth.

“Mom, what’s liposuction?”

Catherine kicked Lily under the table, and Lily let out a yelp. When the telephone rang, I assumed it was my mother and let the machine deal with her. All I knew as her voice crackled over the line and my daughters started pecking at each other was that if something didn’t change soon, the only pleasures I’d ever know again—sexual or otherwise— would likely be of the singular variety.

Excerpted from The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl by Marc Schuster, to be released by PS Books May 2009 (www.psbookspublishing.org)

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t r a c y

s h i e l d s

LEAP YEAR e used earth words and planted gardens and liked going down south and road trips to nowhere. He had tattoos of the Devil on his forearm, and looked like God, with big gentle blue eyes, open, steady and true, able to see beyond the simple human spirit. He was a great kisser. Like me. But quiet.

And deep. Not deep in a click-your-fingers-at-a-coffeehouse deep; and not the kind of temporary deep you think you see in the face of a student of philosophy.

I met him when I was young. In a bookstore. Buying war novels for my father. I liked to call him Mr. Smith, but his name was Steve. His hair was long and kinky and I remember I could smell his clean, hippy, 25-year-old smell as he flushed spines in the history section. He said: “You see, you have this calming affect on me. I actually want to struggle with you.” And I thought to myself, I

H

want to run my fingers through the algebraic recipe that cooked up the lines of your hair. I was on fire. I perused picture books of the American desert and listened to Navajo tunes. I bought a dress covered with flowers that came down to my ankles and I wore sandals.

He struggled with me. And then he took off. Restless. One day in May. He rode with some friends in an orange VW bus out to a reservation in New Mexico to study art and history and eat mushrooms and pledge a vow of celibacy to the Great Spirit in hopes that one day he would understand the differences between love and lust.

I waited. But he didn’t come back.

The Spring was over. The warm, tired, lovesick days of August too, and eventually the fall and then the winter.

I fell for a waiter. I made love to a Jew who became a Rabbi. I danced meringue

with Paul Garcia in a club named Brazil. I kissed Doug, Scot and Eamon and the Twelve Apostles and a Moroccan named Arie. And I gave myself to a drummer one Leap Year because I lost count on how many times he said: you are so beautiful, baby.

I married a Spaniard who barely spoke English and barely brushed his teeth. He was tall and lanky and had a long face like El Greco and chased me around the bedroom. “Come here, wife.

My sex is hard for you.” We lived in a piso on the 4th floor of a rundown building in Vallekas, a gypsy suburb of Madrid. I made tortillas and arroz con leche and sometimes crouched on the terraza under the hot sun and watched stray cats fuck on rooftops. I cried for home. And dreamed of humidity and the green, oxygen pine trees and grass that grows with dew stuck to each blade like a rock climber descending a cliff.

26

Romance by Annalie Hudson © 2009

l e a p

y e a r

I became a woman. Desired. Pedestaled. Unwoven. Torn.

Shredded. Real.

I made two babies. Moved to Jersey. Bought a home.

Divorced. Years passed. In the Spring of ’04 I spread my father’s ashes across the jetty down on Nebraska Avenue. Saying goodbye to the man who taught me how to love. Boyfriends came.

Boyfriends went. Sons grew up.

I bumped into Mr. Smith at a record store one night in February. He was buying vinyl and I was perusing the CDs. I barely recognized him without his long hair. But he still talked smooth and his tattoos were all black and green. And I thought, if I had my own tattoos they wouldn’t be the face of the devil. They’d be words. Words that save me from myself, where God, not man, is the Second Coming and the Third and Fourth. Words when strung together become the only thing in life that’s real—forming a straight line like Time to a Westerner.

We talked about books for a while. The west. He didn’t remember much. And so I shrugged when he asked if I wanted to go for a drink. No, I said. Maybe another time.

Tracy Shields graduated from Rutgers University, magna cum laude, with a degree in English Literature and Journalism. She has been Concept Editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly since 2001. She’s been published in Word Riot and is a continual contributor to Six Sentences. She currently works and writes from home in NJ and has two beautiful sons, Daniel and Julien. Please visit her at http://sevenperfumes.wordpress.com

27

a i m e e ’ s

T i p s

STAYING IN TROUBLE Aimee LaBrie “Only trouble is interesting…” That is one of my favorite quotes from Janet Burroway’s book about narrative craft, Writing Fiction. She introduces this concept early in chapter two, “Story Form and Structure,” to get us thinking about what makes a good story. She then illuminates what she calls the 3-D of story telling: “Drama equals danger plus desire.” In other words, to make a story compelling, our characters must want something intensely, but there must also be an impediment to that want. The thing they want does not have to be huge or abstract (to become the best surgeon in the country, to fall in love, to inspire world peace). It can be small— such as the desire to make the 5:20 train.

It should be specific. And something must get in the way of that want.

28

For example, let’s take the desire to make a particular train. You have a man leaving work at 4:59 p.m. Let’s call him Sam. Sam has almost reached the exit when he runs into his supervisor, a guy who loves to tell long, yawn-inducing stories about his labradoodle. You might even try raising the stakes at this point. We learn that if Sam doesn’t make the early train, he won’t get home in time to intercept the mail before his wife returns home and she will find out…something bad. Something that will change their relationship forever. How he handles the situation from that moment forward will illuminate for us what kind of person he is.

Which brings us to another important part of story telling and characterization: have your characters fight for what they want. Passive characters make for passive

stories. If Sam stands with his arms at his side, nodding his head in immediate defeat, we find it difficult to root for him and the conflict fizzles. If he fights the situation—by telling a white lie, bursting into tears, calling his boss a bore—the story can move forward. Though as writers we may more often be passive observers, our characters must, at least on some level, be people who act. They must keep punching forward toward their desires despite the impediments we throw in their paths.

But let’s get back to trouble. Give yourself a break as a writer by beginning your story in a moment of conflict. It doesn’t have to be hugely dramatic—you don’t need to open with a car crash or a dead body—but it will help you (and your readers) if your story opens with a sense that something is wrong. It is much easier to write yourself out of trouble than it is to build up to it. The more official Latin term for this technique is “in medias res” which roughly translates to mean “in the middle of things.”

With Sam’s story, we might be tempted to begin the story by describing his upbringing and childhood. Or, we might shoot closer to the “now” of the story by opening with him waking up that morning with a slight hangover. We could then get him to the office and listen in on his dialogue with his Russian assistant, Suzanne, about making photocopies for an up coming meeting. Next, we might see him at the lunch truck, puzzling over whether to order a cheese steak or a salad. And then finally, we arrive at the end of day with his boss and the real trouble begins on page 8. Aside from boring the reader, beginning at the beginning can cause misdirection and

confusion for the reader. Is this story about Sam’s drinking problem? An affair with his assistant? His lifelong battle with fatty foods? Jump into the story in the middle—the moment when things are starting to heat up; not when they are at a low simmer.

Now, you might be the kind of writer who enjoys figuring out the history of your characters. You might like creating their best and worst memories. This can be a helpful exercise, because it can uncover moments in the lives of your characters that you hadn’t initially imagined. But it also may be that your readers don’t need to know these things to understand the story. Though it’s certainly interesting to learn that Sam’s dad was an alcoholic circus clown and his mother had a club foot and that when he was five years old, Sam walked in on his dad and the bearded lady in compromising, unfunny positions—if those details don’t forward the narrative and tell us more about how Sam handles his current predicament, then they must be let go.

Readers are fickle and have short attention spans—they live in the moment.

And particularly in a short story, each description and scene must be earned.

Of course, when you’re facing the blank page, it’s difficult and often detrimental to juggle too many rules at one time— you could find yourself second-guessing more than writing. If you’re not sure at first what your character desires that’s okay too. Your initial impulse to write might be an interest in describing your grandmother’s blue willow teacup. But start with trouble. Give us a sense almost immediately that something is wrong, even if that something is just a tiny chip in the lip of the cup.

favorite recent reads from the editorial board of philadelphia stories

QUICKPICKS

futureproof by N. Frank Daniels It is rare when a book comes along that grips you so tightly that you have to finish the book in one sitting. That is exactly what N. Frank Daniel’s novel futureproof does to its readers. This novel is a coming-of-age story set in the early 1990’s. The main character, Luke, spirals out of control when he can no longer live with his abusive stepfather and his passive-aggressive mother. Luke tells us his raw and unapologetic tale that make readers feel his pain, but never feel sorry for him. (Harper Perennial, 2008) -Michelle Wittle, Philadelphia Stories Blogger and Fiction Board

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Sugar Lumps and Black Eye Blues by Tamesha S. Hawkins Tamesha Hawkins wraps her poems in a priceless menu that I read one wickedly delicious and occasionally indigestible meal at a time, a poem from each course. Sugar Lumps and Black Eye Blues reveals a modern young woman’s struggle to find that one sustaining relationship that is worthy of her love and intelligence. I am already hungry for a reading from her next book, Confectionately Yours, scheduled for 2009. -- Christina Weaver, author of the memoir, What You Lose on the Rounabout

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

After This by Alice McDermott After This explores Irish-Catholics on Long Island in the 1950s. The Keane family endures a lifetime of events birth, war, separation, death - which mirror the social changes of the 50s, 60s and 70s. In After This, McDermott experiments with form (each chapter covers a different point-of-view), which can seem episodic, but which paints a full portrait of the Keanes with precision, humor, and insight. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) -- Joanne Green, Philadelphia Stories Fiction Board Member

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O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

Thanks to member support, we have been able to accomplish the following to date: * Publish 18 issues without missing an issue. * Review more than 5000 submissions of fiction, poetry, and essays. * Publish 150 local poets, essayists and fiction writers. * Distribute 180,000 copies of the magazine through 120 locations. * Offer more than 250 participants professional development events for writers. * Introduce 40 guests to established writers through a free lecture series at our first annual Writers Retreat. * Present 150 authors and poets who read from their work during our ongoing free reading series. * Host events that have brought out hundreds of people to enjoy music, food, and fun in support of Philadelphia Stories. * Bring together 235 community members to support the magazine.

YOU can help keep Philadelphia Stories—a non-profit 501c3 managed completely by a staff of volunteers—in print and free by making a donation today! For as little as $20 a year, you can get home delivery and know that your gift directly supports the local arts community.

I understand the importance of providing arts and culture that is accessible to everyone through a publication like Philadelphia Stories.

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Thank you for your generous support of Philadelphia Stories

To donate online please visit www.philadelphiastories.org, by fax 215.635.0195, or mail to: Philadelphia Stories, 93 Old York Road, Ste 1/#1-753, Jenkintown PA 19046