Toy Houses
by Michael Newton
I carry an armful of expensive glassware back to my hotel room after a long day out scouting. Antiques wrested from the hands of the desperate and the needy and the old. It was a good day. If I was a fisherman my nets would have come up full. I lay each thing out in a row on the bed. Then begin processing them for shipment. Bubblewrap and tape. By the time I’m done they’re all in a box which weighs thirty pounds. I lug it down to the Fedex Drop in the lobby.
An Evening With Captain Hugo Brabant (Or Why I Don’t Have Any Photographs For This Story)
by Joseph Helmreich
Editor’s note: With the modern Disneyfication of New York City, downtown’s legendary alternative puppetry scene, which dominated so much of our coverage during that decade, can sometimes feel like a distant memory. In this issue, we revisit a story by the late Jules Van Orman, whose 1976 story about the elusive ventriloquist Captain Hugo Brabant, remains a classic document of the era.
Man
by Camille A. Collins
I
Manfred took the path that crossed in front of the National Museum, flipping up his collar to cover his ears. It wasn’t that cold. He was a Chicagoan, he knew cold. It was just that in haste he’d forgotten his cap and now a draft crept up his back that made him shiver.
He spat a taut syllable of laughter, remembering Charlene the night before. Fifty-five years old and intoxicatingly beautiful; pathos and misery marking her face, evidence of her lust for sweets, liquor and fries resting on her hips―she was worn, berated by life, yet still comely.
Gershon
by Maury Gruszko
Having been puking off the wrong side of the ship to see her in the mist in the distance of the harbor, Gershon’s awareness of the approach came not from shouts and cheers but a swift diminishment of sound, a whole stretch of silence for the first time since they were herded aboard and down into steerage. Nights had been sleepless for so many, he knew, because it was they who’d kept him awake, retching, moaning, making pleasure for themselves in the misery and stench. The stench he could conjure in his memory anytime after, always without trying and never from desire. No one at home could have warned him about steerage, no one had ever come back from אַמעריקע Amerike America, not to Łapy, which had been all he’d ever known. Had they, it wouldn’t have mattered, “choice” having not ever been much more than a word, an idea, and only rarely an option. And then, swiftly swelling like the rising roar of a deluge, the cheering began. From over one of the ship’s funnels he saw a massive, greenish torch, and then there she was. The colossal embodiment of promise.
Night Skaters
by Jacqueline Eis
Sleepless and ruminating at midnight, Phoebe gives up, gets up, and looks out her bedroom window at the night’s full winter moon, street-light bright, sharp-edged, with an icy-looking cloud hanging beside it. A couple, illuminated in the moonlight, ice-skates on the small neighborhood pond across the street. For a moment she thinks the couple could be her father and Dotty, his second wife, waltzing across the ice. Her father was once a very good ice-skater and dancer and has led Phoebe in occasional waltzes around a dance floor or an ice rink. As the couple skates closer, she sees it’s someone else, someone much younger, no one she knows, but playing at romance and showing off, the way Dad and Dotty might have done under her window on a winter night. The skater holds the woman close and leans toward her mouth. Just as Phoebe thinks he’s about to kiss her, he spins her away, her short woolen skirt flaring, and races ahead, teasing. He looks up and briefly makes eye contact with Phoebe at her window, a look she interprets as intrusive and cocky.
In which Danko’s kin do not stamp out his flaming heart, but place it gently back inside his chest.
by Shane Inman
In which the weakest of Danko’s kin, so timid in old Izergil’s telling, kneels with a needle chipped from his rib and a thread woven from his sinew and stitches the young man’s chest so delicately he leaves no scar.
The Whale
by Dan Rivas
At first, the shining darkness appeared to be an island. Or were they imagining it? The four friends had been to this beach at the edge of this ocean for three consecutive years, but no one could remember ever seeing an island. “Maybe there’s a crack in the ocean floor and last night magma seeped through and created an island,” Stacey suggested. The others nodded and made noises of approval because they were young and hungry for earth-moving events. They watched the island as it seemed to rise and fall with the waves until they realized that it was getting closer. Could islands move? “Maybe it’s a whale,” Colin said, and then they all saw it as if for the first time. A whale.
Leroy Street
by Frances Badalamenti
We fly to New York for the first time in three years.
It was exactly three years ago this summer that we had been back. And then I came back home to Portland and came apart. That was when I left the job at the college. It was also when my first book was about to be published. I wasn’t the same again.