ISSUES | winter 2001
24.3 (Winter 2001): "Hardship"
Featuring work by George Bilgere, Mary Bush, Stephen Raleigh Byler, Richard Chiappone, Stacia J. N. Decker, Camille Dungy, Randall Fuller, Wayne Holmes, Jesse Kercheval, Kris Lackey, Anna Meek, Alex Mindt, David Rompf, Alisa Slaughter, Margo Tamez
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Fiction
Nov 27 2011
Searching for Intruders
This was while Alethea’s cancer was taking over again, but before we realized it. We had been getting along well again, renting a house back in Reading. There was a heat wave, and we had no air conditioner. It was late, almost 2:00 A.M. We were naked in bed. She was caressing me, and we were about to make love when we heard the screams.
History as Literature
Sep 01 2001
The Jill-Flirted Mare
“Here she is, Packsaddle Bridge,” Dad announced, and as I looked down through a knothole in the bridge floor I caught a glimpse of a narrow stream far below. “Right down there,” he said, “is where your Uncle Cager lost his team in the quicksand before the bridge went in.”
Poetry
Sep 01 2001
Poetry Feature: Margo Tamez
Featuring the poems: Romantic Valentine’s ay The Sound of Doves On the Wing Romantic A bull snake’s six-foot coil muscles the soil in curls and messes. His tail is… read more
Poetry
Sep 01 2001
Poetry Feature: George Bilgere
Featuring the poems: Eden Waiting Nectarines Anywhere Pain Eden When Sarah and Jill, after a few years Together, decided Sarah should become a man, They thought about it for… read more
Fiction
Sep 01 2001
Drowned Edward Tug
Summer, 1904
Edward Tug was nobody special to Step Hall, especially now that he was a dead man. Step waited on shore while Fred Titus and Elmo pulled the body onto the grass and laid him next to the half-submerged boat they’d found drifting among the cypress stumps that morning. Edward Tug himself was washed into the cypress cove and come to rest against a broken branch dragging in the water.
Poetry
Sep 01 2001
Poetry Feature: Camille Dungy
Featuring the poems Before My History Classes In His Library Vo-Tech From Someplace How Quickly He Went Lament Before My History Classes Grandpa was coming to visit that night,… read more
Fiction
Sep 01 2001
Moon Over My Mountain
The blanket Ina lay on was wool, a scratchy, yellow-gold cloth like her coat. Rich women wore fur coats, she knew. She didn’t know what rich people’s blankets were made of. Ina took a few minutes a day to stretch out and rest. Dinner would be easy, canned salmon and soupy potatoes, rough mashed with extra water, a family favorite. There was no need to get up just yet.
Poetry
Sep 01 2001
Poetry Feature: Anna Meek
Featuring the poems: Morphology Hand Langue De Femme Heirloom Cookbook and Guide for Modern Living
Nonfiction
Sep 01 2001
How to Break a Side of Beef
When I was a boy, my otherwise opinion-shy father decided that my head required a rubbing before I went off to take a test at school. Algebra, history, and chemistry tests gave equal cause for the ceremony, and even, to my bafflement, phys-ed, in which swift, lean boys captured the highest grades by racing two miles in less than twelve minutes.
Fiction
Sep 01 2001
Old Friend
The week before I got out of Gamblers’ Rehab Ranch, my wife, Katie, left me, closed our bank account and took a waitress job in Bullhead City; the day after I got home from the ranch, my father moved in with me. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but it was also right about that time that I started hearing voices from the poker room.
Fiction
Sep 01 2001
Alice in Dairyland
When the phone rang, I was in bed inder the covers, trying to stay warm. As I ran to answer, I saw that it was snowing again. I’d been in Wisconson, America’s frozen dairy land, nearly six years, so I should have been used to it, but I was a Florida girl at heart, and each took me by suprise. “Alice Anne?” a voice said. My name came out slurred, like it was Allison.
Interviews
Sep 01 2001
An Interview with Rick Moody
Interviewer: More than many writers, you seem unwilling to repeat yourself. I’m thinking of the formal experimentation in your work as well as the thematic diversity. Moody: I was educated… read more
Fiction
Sep 01 2001
Male of the Species
Threats where coming from everywhere–voices on the answering machine, vicious notes under the car wipers. There was a brick on the bathroom floor, shards of glass from the broken window and a sheet of paper creased under a rubber band. Bern in Hell! was scribbled in purple chalk on our front steps
Nonfiction
Sep 01 2001
Counter Culture: The Hard Work of Selling Myself Short
The same day I was officially put in charge of shoes and used clothing at Store 5, I came home to my run-down apartment in northeast Washington, DC, to find my first grad-school rejection letter. I thought I was gooing to be stuck in retail for the rest of my life. The soles of my feet were expanding with a new ridge of calluses. I’d dropped enough weight that I worried people would think I was bulimic when I scuffed my knuckles at work. I now looked upon short acrylic nails as an investment.
Fiction
Sep 01 2001
Father White in the Torrid Zone
One by one the lepers’ tongues slithered fot the Host. Father Lawrence White looked down upon the surfacing faces–one without a nose, one without ears, one with a whorled cavity in the cheek. He raised each wafer with an austere flourish, brought it near the supplicant’s tongue and then, like a deft croupier, tossed it in.