The mailman delivers the package on Tuesday. I rip open the small white Fed-ex envelope and a clear zip-lock sandwich bag falls out from between two pieces of cardboard. Inside is the necklace—a large metal cutout of two fists side by side with pinkies extended. “Too much rock for one hand.” It hangs from a cheap metal chain.
He had been watching her for four years—watering her plants, grooming her plants. First in grad school, then when they moved in together in Cambridge, and later in their first house as a newly married couple with house plants. It had taken years for him to credit: to observe, to suspect, to hypothesize about, and finally to believe.
Hello there, I say, and you’re stunned, so stunned you don’t say anything back, you just stare, stare open-mouthed and silent like I’m a ghost. And okay, all right: that’s what I am. People eventually stop calling when calls are not returned. The reflection in the mirror starts to look like someone else—or no one at all.
The photograph is scuffed. She is perfect and visible. There is a horse tangled in her hair. It will be two years yet before it escapes. She doesn’t know, though she is smiling out to you from within the picture’s pool, she doesn’t know yet whether next week she’ll have grown or shrunk by twenty feet, but she knows size is always shifting, and she knows light makes image possible.
The Zanesville Bear Cub & the Puritan Tradition
A truism of American history and thought is our country’s tendency to project evil onto an object and then attempt to destroy that object. We call this “the Puritan tradition,” and it includes woods, Indians, women presumed to be witches, the entire South, New York City when near-bankruptcy, smokers, moderate drinkers and eaters of transfats, practitioners of Islam, those whom the Republicans call “aliens,” and, most recently, exotic wildlife set loose in the small town of Zanesville, Ohio.
mistranslation after Chinese “duck” riddle
Just one among the many ground-scrapers–
all my structures shaken from the rattle of the trains.
Everyone here balances their duties with such accommodating posture;
poses for their big dance number (I put down my book to watch):
Shoulders Up! And Stumble Back!
But it’s hard, everyone drops their intangibles,
rushes through the yapping doors with great chalance.
That’s it. My precarious agenda still in its allotted space. I turn it on and off. On and off. On and off.
Ninety-one days after I quit smoking, my wife bushwhacked me with a brochure for Our Lady of Consolation. I was already in bed with a serial killer novel. Lake finished brushing her hair, then poked her hand into a purse hanging on the doorknob, fished out the brochure and dropped it in my lap. On the cover—an aerial photograph of a white stone monastery nestled among bushy pines.
“You need a break,” she said.
He’d always been stunned by his wife’s beauty when she slept. Sleeping, her natural beauty was undeniable, entirely uninfluenced by his feelings, her feelings, their various difficulties with one another, resentments, by their complex histories, unfulfilled longings, secrets. In repose, there was nothing to interfere with the undeniable fact of her physical loveliness. You might even say angelic. He would say Perfect, if he believed in perfection, or believed that any one deliverance of beauty, any one manifestation of it, or any one vessel shaped into some form of it, could be considered ‘more’ beautiful than some other deliverance, manifestation, shape.
Click the link for a first look at Jurgen Fauth’s Kino, a startling novel coming next year from Atticus Books.
When I stepped barefoot on the bee I was allergic to bees. The Jesus-man steadied me with an even gaze. My attraction to the Jesus-man may have had something to do with feeling like a fraud, which I’d been feeling for too long.
The summer issue of Blip Magazine is now available on Smashwords as an ebook called Blip Reader 2.3. It is selling for $1.99 and is available in all ebook formats (Nook, Kindle,
Waitress
When I was young and had to rise at 5 am
I did not look at the lamplight slicing
through the blinds and say: Once again
I have survived the night. I did not raise
my two hands to my face and whisper:
This is the miracle of my flesh. I walked
toward the cold water waiting to be released
and turned the tap so I could listen to it
thrash through the rusted pipes.
I cupped my palms and thought of nothing.
We invite submissions of 500‑3000 words, fiction and nonfiction, for the fall issue of Blip Magazine. Submissions should be sent as MSWord files (doc or docx) attached to an e‑mail with a short bio. You may also include your text directly in the e‑mail.
We’re pleased to feature an excerpt from James Whorton’s new novel Angela Sloan, just published by Free Press. Check the Features page above or go straight to “Leaving DC.”
Jacinda Russell’s Something Between Want and Desire
Jacinda Russell’s & Nancy Douthey’s In Search of the Center
We are fortunate to have a brace, OK, some short of a brace, a group, half dozen almost, of fine small stories by Frances Lefkowitz, plus a conversation between Frances and our own Meg Pokrass. Apprehend me with mouse to see it now.
I hate the blogging and anything remotely bloggish and all of the crap networking–interesting, yes, for about two weeks after you’ve seen all the available photos of your now shockingly corpulent high school acquaintances. I’d like to see BLIP forcefully
Cleaning House
Kristin vacuums our apartment for the sixth time today. She takes her sweet time inscribing elaborate hieroglyphics in the wheat-colored wall to wall. A word here, a phrase there. She is writing, she tells me curtly, the story of our marriage.
They slept in single beds. My sister and I would sneak upstairs to lie on them when Granny was in the kitchen. We’d divide by gender. Laura would take Granny’s and I would take Granddad’s.
Today we have for you three stories by Jeff Landon and a short interview with the author. Check the FEATURES page or go directly to Algebra.