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Winterland
Who shall sing of winter and its transcendence? O not the Swiss mountains or the Colorado valleys, but of a streetcorner in Medford, Massachusetts, on a 15 degree day: a little storefront shopette thronged with teenage deadbeats in leather car coats and jeans, cigarette smoke tendrilling through their elaborate feathered hair, kicking at clods of dirty snow....
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Christmas With Satan
I lay my head down on the steering wheel of my car and burst into tears. From the back of the car, my seven-year-old son bleated over his seat, “I’m sorry, Mama! I didn’t mean it!” Outside the day wasn’t cold, but it was gray nonetheless, and the grungy, not-hardly-big-enough back parking lot of Politics and Prose bookstore was filled with last minute holiday shoppers. “I don’t want to talk to you right now,"...
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Fire Priestess Season
To build a fire, you first spread down a layer of tinder, soft, wispy bits of twigs and papers that can catch a spark and fold it into flame. Dryer lint—believe it or not, the man explaining it to us said—is ideal. Then a heap of larger sticks, dry as bones, each as long in size as the forearm of a child. That's the kindling, which will suck the evanescent fire upward and burn it brighter, hotter and more golden, a living entity....
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Brick on Brick
We bought our rickety old house almost seven years ago: an eternity of time, it seems to us now. It was winter then and we had just one child—a son, our first, a little butterbean with bright blue eyes whose bright flaxen hair stuck out like cotton from the top of his quilted coat. We were “older” parents, arrived at the end of our long bohemian youth with little more than a pile of books and records. The townhouse had gotten small, its narrow rooms thick with the smell of diapers and breast milk that overlaid....
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Princesses, All
Even as I made the desperate, early September phone call to sign up for Mommy and Me ballet, I was watching myself, with more than a little bit of amusement. I’d been monitoring the website for weeks, trying to wait until the last possible minute when available class space would coincide with my ability to spend the exorbitant amount of money for a semester’s tuition. I was at work, of all things. As though I were planning to buy drugs....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
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