Issue 60

The light said stand, the cave said sleep. The cave said look, here are the eyes that mocked you, the hands that cast you out, said sleep, your sisters need their grief. The light said rise, step out of your sorrows, let them follow only if you choose. The light said choose. Because the light…

for E.J.K. I used to light candles for you (after your death had been catalogued in the secret book) in every cathedral I passed, most in small public squares. Cold stone, incense, the tall silence, the hush and seal of the door at the threshold. Though not a Catholic, I made the sign of the…

after Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory It is not quite peace, this breathing rain, for peace requires human company. I have only tattered cuffs and wisps of thread in my pocket for each soul I could not save. I first mistook the whitewashed brick for barracks, but now, while the rain heaves in…

No further task than this. Dazed, he lifts his head from his right shoulder. Jerusalem, below him, is an underwater drift of specks, flecks, swirling in the tidal blur he descended through. Such a small place, really: hovels, walls, dirt streets, young women shawled, lackluster soldiers sprawling at the temple gates…. Eloi! Eloi! Vinegar and…

What you want to do is turn around slowly, keeping your hands where everyone can see them, and a pleasant smile on your face. You want to confess to all who tracked you to this alley how you were forever afraid of being found out with a bag of wrong answers: To get to Peru,…

…no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned… —Saint Gregory Palamás What had I meant to say? Just now. I have forgotten. Which among the extant flourishing phenomena are you? Is that a limp? The evening drifts into its routine dimming of particulars, quite literally evening the scene…

LAST NIGHT I watched—mesmerized, despite its near three-hour length—Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, a minimalist science fiction epic set in a dreary, bombed-out industrial wasteland. The title does not derive from the contemporary connotation of sexual predator, but goes back to the sort of guide who leads hunters to where game can be found. In fact,…

LENT SHOULD BE in the summer that she might make use of the hotel pool, bandaged up outside like an open wound. She never had a pool. She had a cat but her cat is dead. Buried in leftover snow behind the garage until the ground softens. It would be nice to swim in a pool.…

THIS PLACE SUCKS. You can’t even fuck a guy in your own room.” The girl who said it was on the phone, looking back at the door through a thick tangle of dark hair as Rachel walked in. Her suitcase was already open on the bed by the window, clothes half settled into the dresser…

SHE’D BEEN Flying a Cessna, shooting practice take-offs and landings with a flight instructor at an Omaha airstrip that was just a windsock and one lane of unnumbered concrete runway veined with tar repairs. Richard Nixon was president, the month was September, the temperature was sixty degrees, and she was Karen Manion, mother of two.…