. Spinning .

I did read through all the poetry in this issue, and perhaps because of recent discussion with a friend, this one stands out:

Dichter by Peter Krok (p. 253)

You who have not a claim
Only the clamoring of a tongue
Who are you to say
You’re gnawed by questions
That like squirrels chew
At bags of yesterday’s refuse?

Like every vagrant,
You have a stake in this time.
You scrap together
What won’t be left behind
Hardly knowing why yet only
It stirs that hungry mind.

I like this.  There’s a combination of hopeless and hope, a brazen challenge to move on from the past and its mistakes to a starting point to make better what we can to leave a better world.

This winner of the 2004 Sarah Tucker Fiction Award is well-written by Nan Frydland as to storyline, structure, plot and voice.  Some of the imagery is exceptional:

Mornings I listen to the birds for a while from bed, listen to them call each other in the early silver light.  The air is so warm, and by noon it’ll be sweet and yellow as melted butter. (p. 173)

This is the first person narrator relating the summers of her youth, spent with her grandparents and her aunt somewhere down south (Alabama?) (she lives up north with her mother) and where her father, whom she describes as a flim-flam man attempts to be a father for a day during brief visits. 

There’s some great characterization here, of the narrator and particularly of her grandparents, and a special memory of the three of them going fishing.  Frydland then brings in a closer look at the father-daughter relationship, and it becomes obvious that he doesn’t really care about her as much as his wheelin-dealin’ when he sets her up with a boy who rapes her viciously on a first date, then demands that she keep silent.

In my copy of this book, though I suspect in all, there appears to be some missing pages though the numbering is correct as the closing of this story comes out of nowhere, following a page that ends "Seems that" with no further thought or punctuation.  Then it jumps to the fishing hole being poisoned, and the grandfather’s pronouncement that "that’s the way of the new world.  I’ve seen lots of unnatural things done by men–you get what I’m saying?"  This, I suppose, is indication that while the grandfather believes what has happened is wrong, we’re helpless to fight against change, even the bad.

The Getaway by Martha Whitmore Hickman has a wonderful storyline, that of a woman raising a family in a small town in New Hampshire in the early part of the 20th century.  Rachel is different from most folks of her time, interested in astronomy and science.  Through a well-written and descriptive narrative of Rachel’s life, Hickman guides us through the death of a daughter, the marriages of her sons, and the final blow of losing her beloved husband, Cyrus.  What I found lacking, however, was a reasoning or feeling of how hard the loss of her daughter hit her.  Since it highly impacts the absolutely glorious ending of the story, it would have done well to linger a bit on this portion of the story.  Perhaps it was the details in other areas that took the reader’s attention that somehow made one skip over the obvious, I don’t know. Even the incredible, wonderful ending where Rachel takes action using her knowledge of chemistry and love of astronomy to blast away in a church steeple is a bit deflated by not the gathering together of these elements (that was cleverly done) but by the overexplaining final sentences, "I’ve gone with your father and Miriam," the note said.  "See you later."  It was in his mother’s handwriting. (p. 163) Other than that, I enjoyed it.

John Martin’s The Acorn War is what I would guess to be called psychological realism.  We are hearing the thoughts of a young boy as he talks about squirrels and imaginary dangers and how life could be grand if only, etc.  What we’re hearing is the thread woven through of a dysfunctional family and a boy who is beaten by his drunken father, belittled by his grossly overweight mother, and the kid takes his escape into daydreams.  He imagines acorns as weapons, the loud sound of their falling almost an audible version of his world.  Good, no terrific stuff that had me spellbound by language use, nor a story so different than what is a sad fact of life for so many.

While completely understanding deadlines, typesetting, etc., all the pressures of running a magazine, I still find it hard to accept that in a journal of this caliber I’ve already found nine typos.

The worst part? Most of them appear to be words that would be accepted by Spellcheck in their erroneous form, i.e., "ever" instead of "every," or "than" instead of "that."

Byron Y. Adams has gotten us intimately into the head of his main character, William, partner in a law firm.  Opening the story in a men’s room where the elderly William notes that a young associate seems to always be in there at the same time, Adams exposes William’s prostrate problems that cause him many bathroom trips and the embarrassment of age.

Adams brilliantly uses William’s condition as the impetus for the conflicts (and understandably, tension) as he both faces and tries to hold off retirement and decisions regarding his relationship with his life partner, Tom.  There is a poignancy to this story that brings us along with William on something that we all must grapple with some day, and brought to us in an unusually mundane–base if not for the exquisite handling by Adams–and universally human need.

Written by Jane Bradley, this story is a second person pov, about a woman whose husband has just told her "we have no future, Alice" and covers a very brief period of time as she sits at an airport bar waiting for a connecting flight to go home alone. 

God knows why, but this woman responds to a stranger sitting next to her at the bar and he takes her off to an area hidden from view and things go downhill quickly.

The character didn’t get my sympathy because while it’s obvious she’s hurting and the immediate need for validation is natural, to go wandering off between flights with some sleazebag at a bar?  And he is a sleazebag:

You glance at the doorway.  "Are you sure no one’s there?"  "I’m always certain before I make a move," he says. (p. 135)

Note the "always"?  Besides, even if he was Mr. Wonderful, there’s this:

"That’s it," he whispers.  He grins and kisses, saliva slipping at the corner of your mouth.  As he feeds on you, you swallow the wetness that seeps up from his mouth like a spring.  (p. 134)

Yuck.  ‘Nuff said. (Aside from the sappy sex, the ending was rather tritely tied in to that "no future" statement so it’s really not worth any more words on this one.)

This story stands out from the rest as daring in content: the first person narrator, a Thalidomide baby now grown, who has his first sexual experience with an overpainted, boozing, drug-loving, epileptic midget (little person), with a twist of humor and sad loneliness that’s presented in a fine voice and style by Alicia Gifford.

Oh, and did I mention a bitten-off penis?

It takes a good writer to throw all this together and pull it off, and Gifford, I believe, has done it.  I remember in one of my CW classes that one of the first student stories offered for workshopping was of the accident occuring just as the driver’s getting a blow job and the expected result.  But it was the usual amateur mistake of making that moment the climax (no pun intended) of the story, when it was so obviously built up to that particular focus as a shocker.  In Gorgeous World, the scenario is but a moment on the way down the arc, a confirmation of a decision already made, so well used by the author.

There’s also a nice contrast in what the narrator is saying to what we think he feels, and not in the usual sarcastically flippant manner.  In the opening line, "I’ve forgiven my mother, she didn’t know what she was doing," we are pulled in and interested as he relates the circumstances of his birth.  There is delicate subject matter here, in describing what surely is the heartbreaking reality caused by the drug, as well as the fact of his girlfriend, and Gifford handles it in a very down-to-earth, politically incorrect, and yet open and honest manner.  Humor is a healer, and the narrator’s nickname of Penguin is just the beginning of acceptance and a road to normalcy.  Open honesty may hurt, but it is better than proper words that offend even more by their attempted masquerade.

Entertaining, provocative, and one story that’ll stick with you.

Normally I dislike first person revelatory introspection stories, but this by Katherin Nolte is smooth and quick enough to overcome the typical flippant and sassy attitude of a life gone wrong and the paths it might have taken instead.

Roseanne begins by telling us, "My breasts were important to me, but I wished I’d been born a genius." (p. 104) Right there, with the opening line, I felt this story would be different from all the rest because it was stylistically well done.  It opened up the story with all kinds of quesitons while giving valuable insight into the mind of the narrator.

The story becomes one of extreme lack of self-confidence and family dysfuntion without being painfully corny or trite, and Nolte seems well familiar with the subtleties simile in getting a point across:

"Well, not stupid really, but I figured since I wasn’t a genius, why even try to be smart.  It’s like those musicians who devote their lives to studying an instrument, only to attend a concert and hear another musician blow them away." (p. 104)

And a nice homage to Margaret Atwood’s short story, Endings, in closing with a "what if" frame of mind of the narrator as she offers the reader the same possibilites of her dreams as that of her reality. 

Nolte’s writing style and use of different techniques certainly raised This is the Part to Wonder above the usual run of the mill stories in this vein.