In Brevity's Fall 2011 issue, Rachel Smith, Charles Bethea, Darlene Pagán, Alexis Wiggins, Thomas Gibbs, Dionisia Morales, Joe Bonomo, Gary Fincke, Mark Yakich, Anna Vodicka, Brenda Miller, Pauls Toutonghi, Katherine Riegel, Sean Finucane Toner, Lori Jakiela, and Caitlin Horrocks take off their shoes, visit the epicenter of the sexual revolution, listen to Walter Cronkite, and picture the apocalypse, briefly and vividly.
Our new issue also features craft essays by Lia Purpura and Lee Martin, four fine new books reviews, and photography by Annie Agnone.
Perhaps the earth was a naked dark brown, or pale with shoots promising corn, wheat, soy. I can’t tell you, and that tells you something about me, this Midwesterner who doesn’t know what fields look like in May.
The nurse who preps my mother for surgery is kind. She wears clogs and a smock with balloons and rainbows all over it. Her hair is pulled into a high ponytail. Overhead, the TV is tuned to Good Morning America. The sky over America is popsicle blue.
I picture myself alone, halfway up an indeterminable climb. Are there sprawls of ivy? Fallen branches? A gang of hardened literati with ink-drop tattoos? "Well, look here, thriller writer," they'd say as they brandish shivs of DeLillo and Simic. "Think you're tough enough to face the ineffable?"
My brother—a firefighter in real life—tries to organize us all, get us down into some echoing subterranean cavern that looks like the inside of a ship. Explosions rattle in my sternum, giant robots search the houses, wind flings fire this way and that. The end of everything.
Dusty yellow-grass hills. Ponderosa pines. A wide-open, unblinking blue sky. And, of course, the frontier archetype at the center of it all, the rodeo cowboy, with his various violent pastimes: Steer wrestling, saddle bronc riding, calf roping, barrel racing, wild cow milking—and more.
We’ll see it as if looking through a scratched and dirty window, with blips and bleeps and static and a shimmering gray overlaying everything because he’s out there now, a lone man in a different atmosphere altogether, moving backward down the ladder one slow step at a time.
The littlest one, who screamed all night, is finally asleep in the crib, and the baby’s father drives you home slurry at the wheel, and he slides a roving hand across the divide and onto the space that used to be known, seconds ago, as your innocuous upper thigh.
Alcohol, drugs, sex, TV, exercise, gaming, shopping, gardening, napping, a six-pack of low-fat double-dutch chocolate pudding—there are any number of ways to get through the day. The only thing that keeps me going, however, is a regular drive out to the New Orleans airport.
The candy looked to be lemon flavored. A sourball. “It’s good,” Derek whispered, pointing at his mouth. And then, before he had crossed the lobby to where I was standing, Derek suddenly stopped and stiffened, turning mute and flushed.
He arrived limping into the school parking lot at eight a.m. sharp, injured by a rock discharged from the lawn mower he’d pushed through his family’s yard. He exaggerated his sore ankle, shifting from leg to leg, and his face blazed with discomfort.
The Mountain Climber didn’t like to talk about the accident, but because she alone had witnessed the Skier fall off the top of the world, the press had no one else to turn to. What could she say?
Sally’s husband, Jim, didn’t wait for me to ask questions. “Doctor Gibbs, there’s blood all over the bathroom floor. Sally passed out. She’s lying between the toilet and tub. What should I do?”
When it came, you thought: only this? You thought maybe there was more. More than just grabbing and rubbing and shoving against each other in someone’s parents’ guest bedroom while the party thumped downstairs like a weak heartbeat.
In a fluffy dress I won’t be able to name the color of an hour later, she looks like a flower, a gold-trimmed rose. Maybe three years old. How sweet, I think. It occurs to me to try with my husband for a third; he’s always wanted girls.
Each time I visited his little apartment on the eleventh floor, I sat on his bed holding photocopies. There wasn’t anywhere else to sit, except the old sofa chair where he hunched over his bottle of cheap vodka waiting for his telephone to ring, a woman to appear, or his heart to stop.
“The soldier tried to take this off,” she says, holding up her wrist, her jade bracelet shifting an inch lower. “He kept slamming it with the end of his gun but it wouldn't break. They threw knives at me, at my eyes, like darts.” She traces the scar.
NEW BOOK REVIEWS, CRAFT ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS
In our Craft Section, Lia Purpura suggests the state of not-knowing is fragile, easily overrun – and profoundly important, while Lee Martin turns his back on doing more research and gathering more facts. These essays are adapted from presentations the authors gave as part of Jill McCabe Johnson’s excellent panel, “What the Narrator Doesn’t Know: The Importance of Speculation in Narrative,” at the AWP 2011 Conference. This is the second of a two-part series. The first part of the series featured essays by David Huddle and Dinah Lenney, also found in our Craft section.
And on our Book Review Page, Todd Davis reviews Tom Montgomery Fate’s Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild, Rebecca Fish Ewan reviews Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace, Jennifer Ochstein reviews Andre Dubus’s Townie, and Jennifer Nelson reviews Sharyn Wolf’s Love Shrinks: A Memoir of a Marriage Counselor’s Divorce.
NEW BOOK REVIEWS, CRAFT ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS