Fall/Winter 2009-10
tom oristaglio
scott summers
cindy childress
tom rechtin
james b. nicola
debra rymer
doug draime
corey mesler
rebecca schumejda
chris crittenden
arlene ang
joey nicoletti
brad johnson
lorie allred
elizabeth kay
alexander russo
nissa lee
kenneth gurney
jessi lee gaylord
keith brighouse
ajay vishwanathan
ethel rohan
william "cully" bryant
julie steiner
Steiner Interview
by Alex Nodopaka
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Alex Nodopaka
Patrick Carrington
Mannequin Envy in memory of poet and artist Douglas Gamrath
|
|
David Jordan
Summer 2009
Pervert
“Don’t do that!” cries Sara Majors, splaying one hand over her naked breasts and the other over her pubic hair. “Stop it! You can’t just stand there leering like some pervert!”
Toby holds the shower curtain open with his right hand. He watches glistening water slide across the soft, pale contours of his wife’s flesh. “Derek wants to know if he can take the Volvo,” Toby says. “He’s going to a movie.”
“What?” Sara snatches the curtain from Toby’s fingers. Her body disappears behind a sheet of plastic painted with white-and-yellow daisies. “The Volvo? I don’t care.”
Toby lingers in the doorway of the tiny bathroom off their bedroom. The shadow of Sara’s body floats behind the shower curtain. “I thought you needed it for Garden Club. You said you were going to Tualatin.”
“I don’t care. Tell him to take it. Now -- do you mind?”
“I thought you said about Garden Club. Mind what?”
“Carla is driving. We’re taking her car to Tualatin. Leave, please. Close the door.”
Toby steps back and swings the door shut. He starts to walk away, but pauses. He returns to the door and opens it again.
“Pervert?” he says. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Toby, please,” Sara replies. “I’m trying to shower.”
He closes the door part way, halts, sticks his head back into the steamy little room. “Don’t call me a pervert,” he says.
One edge of the shower curtain crinkles and Sara’s wet face appears, surrounded by daisies. The short curls of her gray-blond hair -- she recently stopped coloring it -- droop. Water drips from her forehead into her blue eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Sara says. “It’s the fat girl syndrome, I guess. Just like when I was ten years old, I don’t like people looking at me naked.”
“You’re forty-nine, not ten.”
“I know. Still . . .”
“We’ve been married twenty-four years.”
“I know.”
“We have two children. Including the one who wants the car.”
Sarah sighs.
“I’ve seen you naked before. On occasion.”
Sara stares silently at Toby. He stares back.
There are so many things Toby wants to add, so many of Sara’s rebukes and dismissals and stiff-armings over the years he wants to itemize, to present as a grand total of sexual shortchanging that has culminated somehow in this insult. But he senses they teeter at the edge of a marital abyss. A single misstep could send them toppling into unending darkness. Words flee from him like startled deer.
He shuts the bathroom door, walks away. Exiting the bedroom, he mutters: “Perverts have syndromes. I don’t.”
David Jordan, who lives in Bend, OR, is a former newspaperman and teacher turned fictionwriter/poet. He has published work in more than 100 literary journals, including Nimrod, Rattle, Comstock Review, Thema, The Chaffin Review and Red Wheelbarrow. His stories and poems appear online in such e-magazines as Zygote in My Coffee, Opium, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon, The Dead Mule, Right Hand Pointing, The Circle, Spillway Review and The Fossil Record.
Don Shaffer Love Lives Here
Winter 2007
Topless Breakfast
A red neon sign beams its bright message through November morning mist on McLoughlin Boulevard:
Half a dozen men have straggled from dawn's cold drizzle into the squat white restaurant beneath the sign, three graveyard workers from North Pacific Lumber, a couple of salesmen fueling up for drives to Walla Walla and Klamath Falls, a drunk who thinks his hangover will throb less if he forces down food before stumbling back to the trailer park.
One waitress handles the counter, another takes orders at tables. It's Helen at the counter, she's forty and fat, bleached blonde, dugs hung like bread dough from wide shoulders. And Heidi at the tables, she's twenty-two and red-haired, tiny pink-tipped breasts barely breaking the freckled skin over her ribs. Helen has married and divorced three times, is not easily amused. Heidi's husband pumps gas at Lee Texaco, starts work at noon after she finishes the breakfast shift and goes home to care for their daughters, ages four and three.
The lumber workers talk quietly in a booth, eat bacon and scrambled eggs, steal glances at Helen and Heidi. The drunk slouches on a red leatherette counter stool, squeezes his forehead, stares into a thick white mug of oily coffee. The salesmen sit at separate tables, calculate mileage, commissions. Helen jams four pieces of bread into the toaster, uses a paper napkin to wipe a speck of margarine from her left breast. Heidi shivers, wishes she could grab her blue blouse from its hook in the kitchen. She doesn't mind if millhands check out her naked chest, but she is so damn cold.
By Don Snell
Fall 2007
Real
It's been a month since she dumped me and I'm still sleeping on my brother's couch. (I just don't like spending nights alone, you know?) It's Sunday -- Monday morning, really, 1 a.m. -- when she knocks. I pull on jeans, stumble to the door. There she stands, blonde and blue-eyed, lovely as the night she told me she was checking into a coast motel with the guy from the next desk.
"I spent the weekend at his place," she says, "and I needed to see you. When I'm with him, I sometimes feel like I'm not real."
I yank a shirt on and we drive across town to my apartment, where we split the last Budweiser as she tells me he listens to stereo "Rigoletto," he bought her a biography of William O. Douglas, he talks constantly of climbing their shared corporation. He has two kids. His ex-wife kept the girl, who is five. The boy is seven. He went to the coast with them. (Did the boy sleep in the next bed while they made love? Or do you rent a separate motel room for a seven-year-old so you can have privacy for sex? She didn't say.) He grew up in Yakima. He's thirty-one, had a vasectomy, wears a lapel pin advertising it. Sometimes she doesn't know what to say to him, so she just stares out the window.
"Could we go to bed?" she asks. "Could we go to bed and you just hold me?"
We go to bed. I hold her. After a while, she sleeps. She awakes at five-thirty, goes home to shower for work. She says she'll call. She doesn't.
I guess she got real.
|
|
