nonfiction by Marian Crotty
Admit to yourself that straight girls don’t usually spend four hours a day masturbating themselves numb to “The L Word,” stop sleeping with men altogether, and you might just find her. When you do, it will seem like fate. She will be beautiful and smart with just enough swagger to let you think she might like women. A Ph.D. student at the school where you adjunct. Perhaps, when a friend asked what type of woman you might like, you even said her name. Maybe, years before, when you saw her for the first time, strutting across a parking lot with her long dark hair and mirrored sunglasses, you thought, “I really need this girl to love me,” and were disappointed for weeks to learn she had a fiancé.
It will be years later, after the fiancé and successive boyfriends are out of the picture, that a throwaway line from her—a stupid line you don’t believe about women being the subject of art because their bodies are more aesthetically pleasing—will make you flirt. What you say at this point does not need to be smart, is better maybe, if it’s clumsy, gross, and nervous.
Continue Reading
ONE DAY THE DOCTOR TELLS YOU YOU’RE BLIND
to the truth. It’s physical; something about
the retina, rods, and cones. Truth is a wave-
length in the spectrum you’re unable to detect.
All your life you’ve been compensating,
convincing yourself you could see what you
could not. Suddenly you’ve got questions
Continue Reading
fiction by Peter Ho Davies
Perhaps because he had no singing voice, Pop leaned forward to twist the dial when Nelson Eddy came on to do “Song of the Vagabonds.” “What, Saul,” my mother called from the doorway, giving a wiggle of her hips, “you got something against a little music?” but my father shushed her so sharply I looked up from my books. He was bent close to the radio, his eyes on us, but wide and unseeing. “We interrupt this broadcast.” It was the first bulletin.
Things moved fast after that. There was a banging on the floor below—Mrs. Z—and my father hurried down. By the time he’d run back up there were drumming feet overhead and in the halls, the din stilled only momentarily for a statement from the Secretary of the Interior. But where was the President? How I yearned for the calm “Good evening, friends” of one of his fireside chats.
“C’mon, already!” my father cried when he reappeared. “To the basement.” My mother ran to wake Milt and I followed her, looking around wildly for something to save. What was my most valuable possession? My magic apparatus, of course. I’d been given a set—trick deck, silk scarves, and my prize, an oboki box for coin tricks—for my Bar Mitzvah. I snatched the lot up, along with the reel of invisible thread, and stuffed it in my pockets. I could hear my mother trying to explain about the Martians to Milt. “The Martins?” he asked sleepily, scratching the toes that peeked out of the end of his cast. “Who are the Martins?” And then my father was there. “Forget Martians, Edith. Never mind that. These radio fellows don’t know bupkis. It’s Germans. See if it ain’t.” Until then I’d not been so afraid. I didn’t know anything about Martians. But Germans … I could see it in Milt’s saucer eyes … Germans were real.
Continue Reading
nonfiction by Tiya Miles
Here in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest, waterways were especially pivotal to Underground Railroad history, and movement to and across those waters highlights the remarkable bravery, determination, and resourcefulness of escaping slaves as well as their allies. The Old Northwest (the Midwestern territory designated by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787) was central ground for abolitionist struggle in the middle decades of the nineteenth century because of its location on two liquid borders. The line between the slaveholding country of the U.S. and the free realm of British-controlled Upper Canada (or Canada West), and the line between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio flowed through this region in the form of water.[2] The winding rivers and ample lakes that characterized the area’s geography and marked the boundaries between and among colonial-European states and Native nations also became physical markers, signs, and routes of the Underground Railroad.
Continue Reading
