New World Writing Quarterly

Sitting beside a suf­fer­ing, hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing zebra (real­ly a horse with stripes) was not new to the women in my fam­i­ly. My moth­er had expe­ri­enced it, as had my grand­moth­er and my grand­moth­er’s grand­moth­er. Now it was my turn

“For every pot there is a lid,” my moth­er said before she died. Nobody knew why she said it or why only females cried.

Here it was again, a life and death moment in the ani­mal king­dom call­ing for human com­pas­sion. In many ways this expe­ri­ence would be no dif­fer­ent than fish­ing for com­pli­ments from a bored hus­band on weekends.

We’ve just put up a new sec­tion of a new nov­el from Mary Grimm along with an inter­view in which Mary talks about pub­lish­ing on the Web, e‑books, and oth­er top­ics that might be of inter­est to our read­ers. Click the fol­low­ing link to vis­it Mary Grimm.

I still don’t love you; my arm fell off.

I see my ex at the gro­cery, peck­ing at fruit, those new mini-water­mel­ons. I catch the back of her head, her red hair, from the auto­mat­ic doors, her pur­ple tee from two years ago’s 5K for dys­tro­phy. One change: Her left arm is gone, the short sleeve tied into a knot at the shoulder. 

Congratulations to Dorianne Laux and George Singleton both of whom have had work from New World Writing select­ed for inclu­sion in the new edi­tion of Best of the Net, due out soon from Sundress Publications.

Driftwood

There’s no rea­son to call each oth­er Tic and Tac, but we do just to keep up with that kind of child­hood bond, the one formed acci­dent­ly because par­ents put us togeth­er in rooms and in cars, bound into seat­belts and bunk beds. You’re almost always wil­ing to share your caramels, sticky in the white bag, sea air melt­ing them wet. I say, “It sucks that dad’s a fag­got,” and you say nothing.

Julia knocked on the door and I answered in a pair of rat­ty blue jeans, hold­ing a put­ter and three golf balls. She had a friend with her, a teenage boy, who did all the talk­ing at first. He deliv­ered a script­ed speech about cre­ation ver­sus evo­lu­tion, and read from Hebrews some­thing that said

WE’RE READING NEW FICTION AND NONFICTION with an eye toward the April 2012 issue. If you’d like to sub­mit, please fol­low the link below, leave a short bio note and any­thing else we might need to know. We are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in work of medi­um –more

Self-Checkout

The man behind her said, “Let me ask you a ques­tion,” but she didn’t turn to see what the ques­tion would be.  Something about what he said both­ered her—it was the way he put it.  She was out of sorts today, but, nev­er­the­less, what he said was not the same as ask­ing, “Can I ask you some­thing?” Or say­ing, “Excuse me, I’ve been wondering…” 

Whoa, Hey

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. 

Indoor Gardening

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.

Precision 

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.

Camera Lux

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. 

Our Lady of Consolation

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.

Perfume

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.

I Asked The Lord To Giveth Me A OneTouch

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, –more

Waitress