fiction by Karen Heuler
Truly the most astonishing thing happened when that new employee Mindy walked into the meeting wearing Paulina’s hair.
Paulina’s hands immediately went up to her head. Bald. Maybe a little patch of stubble.
Paulina gasped, but her coworkers at the meeting smiled a bland welcome to Mindy. Couldn’t they see what had happened?
Paulina’s hands began to shake in anger. Her pencils had been disappearing, even her scotch tape. And now this!
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nonfiction by Joanna Brooks
So there I was: a Mormon girl in Republican Orange County during the Reagan years of the Cold War, watching the jets and helicopters traverse the skies over the orange groves, witnessing with my bodily and spiritual eyes the last hurrah of the Southern California military-industrial complex.
“You see,” my mother would say, standing by the swimming pool, pointing out all the strategic targets within a few miles of our house—south across the groves to El Toro Marine Base, then west across the asparagus and strawberry fields to John Wayne Airport, and the two massive concrete blimp hangars at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station—“They’ll drop the bombs right on top of us.”
“We’ll be fine,” she says, her eyes on the horizon. “We’ll be gone in the twinkling of an eye.”
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The No Coast Derby Girls skate at Pershing Auditorium in downtown Lincoln, fifteen hundred miles from the Pacific, eleven hundred from the Atlantic, and two blocks from the Nebraska State Capitol, a domed sandstone tower locals call, with a mixture of affection and scorn, “The Penis of the Plains.” The building dominates the landscape like something out of The Lord of the Rings, but in lieu of a lidless all-seeing eye there’s a red pulsing light that warns away low-flying planes. That light flashes between the legs of the Sower, a nineteen-foot statue bestriding the Capitol’s dome, frozen in the act of scooping seed from his massive groin-level pouch. Inside, the walls gleam with mosaic murals portraying bull-necked Teutonic farmers harvesting golden fields, their sturdy wives and grim children pitching in. Manifest Destiny is taken seriously around here. Everything is goldenrod and indigo, vermillion and emerald, and the figures in their fertile landscapes hang foreshortened and humorless above the viewer like Titans. The style might best be described as Übermensch Socialist Agrarian. In fact, one of Hitler’s intra-bunker memos detailed his plan to move the capital of the Nazi empire to Lincoln after conquering the United States and to rule the world from its Capitol, under the aegis of the virile Sower.
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Kumar’s bones were pushing up under his skin like silent hills. His ribs rippled up in hardened waves while his shoulders and wrists stood out in knotted clumps. In the afternoons, I would count Kumar’s bones while he tried to sleep.
“You’re counting the same one twice,” he would mumble without opening his eyes.
“Well it’s poking up in two places. A lot of them are.”
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essay by Suzanne E. Smith
In the conclusion of my book Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, I described the fanfare that surrounded the fortieth anniversary of Motown Records, which included a commemorative compact disc boxed set, an ABCTV documentary miniseries, and a special Motown halftime show at the Super Bowl. The show culminated with Martha Reeves singing her signature song, “Dancing in the Street.” As I noted, “[b]y the time the song reached one of its most famous lines, ‘Can’t forget the Motor City,’ nothing seemed more forgotten than Detroit, Michigan, Motown’s birthplace.”
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