Photography Front and Back Cover by Robert Gregory Griffeth
Poetry Dead Mice in the Art Class by Carl Miller Daniels His Ass was on Fire by Kurt Nimmo No Coney Island of the Mind by Thomas H. Brand A License Plate by Michael Walls Fiction (excerpt) The Ransom by B. D. Love Dead Mice in the Art Class By Carl Miller Daniels "We are going to take the dead mouse and dip it into paint and print with it" says the instructor, a willowy blond young man with tight pants and broad shoulders and otherwise hyper-sexual features. "We are using the mouse because i am interested in your exploring your natural feelings of revulsion toward certain things and perhaps mastering them." "The only colors you may use when you dip your mice are black and blue," he says. "Then you press your paint-dipped mouse onto the paper once or twice or as many times as you like." I am outraged. My artistic freedom is being constrained. Two colors! One of them not really a color! One of them, in fact, the very negation of color. He hands me my mouse. His fingertips brush mine and linger a few seconds. "You can use different shades of blue," he says to me, and to the class as a whole. We all seem appeased. My mouse stinks. It has the smell of rot. Students are pluckily picking up their mice and dipping them and pressing them onto paper. The smell is ghastly. "Do you find all this disgusting?" the instructor asks, hopefully. I actually see a maggot crawl out of my mouse and leave an intriguing trail as it crawls across my paper. I title my picture "Accidental Art" and get a big fat A. The instructor seems ecstatic at what a good job everyone did, except for the one or two who wouldn't touch the dead mice. He gave them rubber mice though, started their grade at C, and subtracted from there accordingly. Back to top His Ass was on Fire By Kurt Nimmo It was the hemorrhoids, the damn things flared up again. He sat on the sofa looking outside at the children. It seemed to him the neighbors didn't like their children very much. They were tricked into marriage and parenthood back when they were eighteen years old and now resented it. He sat there with a half gallon bottle of vodka in the window. It soothed the burning of his ass for the moment. It also made him not give a shit about the way things had gone sour with the woman. She was going to marry the other guy, the unemployed construction worker. He didn't question her stupidities. He was a malleable male lump, nearly perfect for her fingers. She sculpted the unemployed construction worker like fresh yellow clay. He never drank too much or thought about things very few other people bothered with. l'm insane, he thought. You're insane if you go against the myths and superstitions of the tribe. An HMO psychiatrist wanted to disable part of his brain with drugs. Another so-called professional wanted him to enroll in a substance abuse program. If they take away the substances, he thought, I will go crazy. If sober long enough a person is capable of anything, even voting for George Bush. He laughed as a black fly jumped off the window screen. It flew around the room. He thought briefly about killing it. And then the hemorrhoids began throbbing the damaged tissue of his asshole and a little girl screamed in the street. Her voice sounded like glass breaking. She will buy into the myth, he thought, like ninety-nine percent of them. Sunlight came in the window. It shot the half gallon bottle of vodka full of white light. He looked at it. She deserves the unemployed construction worker, he thought, and then he told himself it was all meaningless. He looked around for the fly and thought about killing it. Back to top No Coney Island of the Mind By Thomas H. Brand Eating chicken legs with greasy fingers, then pushing thigh bones like spikes into the hot sand as though at the Black Sea, three fleshy Russians sit on their blanket before us enjoying July in America. In this sea of languages, we are the ones embarrassed to have pilgrimed to Coney Island for all the wrong reasons, an amusement park and a line of Ferlinghetti we once read back in Minnesota. Thirty years too late in both cases and not prepared with towels or suits or attitudes of the day, we sweat for a half hour and then head toward the House that Ruth Built in pursuit of whatever it was pulled us to this sad relic in the first place. Back to top A License Plate By Michael Walls hangs beside the beveled mirror of a bar in Gadsden, Heart of Dixie where tattooed men in black leather park their Harley-Davidsons and drink Budweiser on Saturday night. On a dirt road, half-way between Boaz and Fort Payne, an old man passes familiar fins on a rusted out hulk that rests on blocks like a pyre under the slow burning August sun. He walks across fifty yards of kudzu and two gullies to get a closer look. A wasteland, crisscrossed with spider webs stretches between front fenders. A spiralled hornet's nest hangs like a papier mache cone into emptiness, once a front window. Back when it shone, and A Summer Place played at the drive-in on Saturday night, he loaned his Chevy to his nephew. It was almost ten years later on the ride back from the cemetery before he told his sister about the gold coin pack and church key he had found under the back seat, her son's red-faced grin when he returned them. She had giggled like a schoolgirl, while tears dripped onto the triangle-folded piece of cottonred, white and blue, she squeezed between gloved fingers. For a long time he just stands out there in a washed out pasture in the quiet of a summer afternoon, miles from a town or interstate highway, alone, with just the buzzing of a hornet and the soft strings of Percy Faith. Back to top The Ransom (excerpt) By B. D. Love Jack Carpenter put the answering machine on rewind and went to the kitchen to pour himself a Scotch. He was trembling. He poured a double. Then he came back to the living room. The day's last light sifted through the windows and hung in the dust his feet had raised as he dragged them across the carpet. He sat down beside the machine and let it play through once more from the beginning. It was like a parade, he thought. It was the pageant of his daily life. First there was the mechanic, telling him that the repairs on theTriumph were going to run unexpectedly high. This was something Jack Carpenter had fully expected. Another day on the RTD. Wonderful. Then came his ex-wife, shrilling for money and, as always, reminding him of why she'd ex-ed him in the first place. There was a passage of silence that usually indicated an automated sales message or a wrong number. Next, somebody wanted to talk to Pepe. This message was in Spanish. It sounded urgent, but messages in languages he didn't understand always seemed to Jack Carpenter to be urgent. His mother wondered how he was surviving the divorce. His girlfriend, bored at work, just called to fill up some tape. His old health club wanted him back. So did his chiropractor. Jack Carpenter took a strong sip of the whiskey. The next message began with fifteen seconds or so of very soft breathing. Then a voice he did not know, a woman's voice, or that of a very young male, began very calmly and quitely. "We've got your son." Not the words themselves, but something in the tone of the voice sent a jolt straight to the bone. The plot itself was bad television, tabloid stuff. "We've got the little boy. You're going to have to pay. We want " The tape cut off whatever remained of the message. His girlfriend was still bored. He set the controls to erase the messages. Jack Carpenter was sure the threat was nothing but a prank. After all, he and his wife had been childless. There had been women beforebrief affairs, one-nighters, but the chances were practically nil any one of them might have produced a child. He imagined a couple of teenage girls sprawled on sofas, bored in the way only teenage girls could be, dialing numbers at random. Is your refrigerator running, he recalled asking a gullible party when he was a bored teenager. Yes? Then you'd better go catch it! Sooner or later, someone must have let poor Prince Albert out of the damned can. The next morning Jack Carpenter scoured the Times for any mention of a kidnapping. There was none. At the office that day he listened to an all-news station. Nothing. He was watching the eleven o'clock wrap-up on Channel 4 when the phone rang. "Hello?" "We've got your little boy." "This isn't particularly funny." "It isn't meant to be." Back to top |