Issue 69

From The Parables of Mary Magdalene It is like a single cherry tree, surrounded with fences and growing in an orchard of cherry trees. The fruit of the one tree is no redder or less red than the other trees’ fruit. Where its bark has cracked, sap oozes out, forming amber beads that harden in…

His paraclete was a piebald donkey bequeathed him by a kindly parish priest whose sins he supped away one Whitsunday some months in advance of your man’s demise. “Never a shortage of asses, Argyle. God knows we’ve all got one of them at least.” Which seemed the case on closer scrutiny. Argyle named the wee…

The Moveen lads were opening a grave in Moyarta, for Porrig O’Loinsigh, got dead in his cow cabin in between two Friesians, their udders bursting, his face gone blue. “As good a way to go as any, faith,” said Canon McMahon the parish priest. “Sure, wasn’t our savior born in such a place?” Unmoved by…

At Poulnabrone Dolmen Argyle poured his soul’s ache into the hole of sorrows, huddling under the ancient capstone against the cold and crueler elements. Stone portal, stone cairn, stone everywhere— the rocky desert of the Burren bore a semblance to his own hard-weathered heart made barren by years of cast aspersions, pox, maledictions, cursed loneliness…

Argyle shat himself and, truth be told, but for the mess of it, the purging was no bad thing for the body corporal. Would that the soul were so thoroughly cleansed, by squatting and grunting supplications. Would that purgatories and damnations could be so quickly doused and recompensed, null and voided in the name of…

hors d’oeuvres THE HASTILY ASSEMBLED spread on the dining-room table—Pringles, Wheat Thins, a bottle and a half of Merlot, four cans of Diet Dr. Pepper, a bowl of leftover Halloween candy—might be worse than no spread at all. This is one reason the hosts, Wendy and Drew Pike-Stuyvesant, are ashamed of and angry with each…

YOU SAY YOU’D LIKE a story for the ages, but you should know we live a little outside of time out here. Out here is the Nebraska panhandle, leveled as immaculately by wind and the spin of the planet as if it’d been planed by a master carpenter. As if the raw materials of the…

HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the victors, so the saying goes. It would be pleasant to believe that the history of literature (or the arts in general) might prove an exception to this rule, that artistic merit will always be recognized in its own time, regardless of fashion or ideology. But we know that’s not true.…