Pages (PDF): 166
Publisher: The Long Story
Purchase includes: PDF

IN THIS ISSUE

Mark Gula’s “Ernesto’s Story” deals with love and undying fidelity. Ernesto first loved Mayela, whose father wanted her to be a nun, then their deformed daughter Angelica and, after Mayela deserts them, he brings all his love and devotion to his daughter and then Felipe. But why are the people in a small town on the coast of Mexico savagely beating Felipe?

Paul Weidner’s “A Tale Told by an Idiot” offers us a marvelous comic story with a rather different first person narrator, one who is having trouble with typing on a computer as he reveals himself to be one of the lowest performers in a traveling circus in France who doesn’t get the respect he deserves.

In William Davey’s “Under the Parasol Pines” Army nurse Jane Barnes, fearing her black market activities during World War II in Algeria might be revealed by a wounded soldier, one Mike Santini, lures him to a isolated cliff overlooking the Mediterranean to accuse him of rape, a capital crime in wartime.

In Gerri Brightwell’s “Waltzing” Jess’s work at a nursing home begins to affect her negatively, making her feel as if life’ s nearly over and everything is useless; she even begins to think she doesn’t love her husband Bruno anymore; but when romance blossoms between a male inmate and a married woman with Alzheimer’s and a domineering husband, she begins to gain some perspective.

Paul Nelson’s “Just for Eggs” is set in a elegiac key. The narrator, who as a Dartmouth graduate is regarded by many in the small coastal town in Maine as an outsider, befriends many of the hard-working and hard-drinking outdoors men of the town. One of them is Mike, a decent man who is both constable and dogcatcher in town, but who in a drunken state serendipitously kills a wife-beater.

In John Preston’s “Everything Important Happens on a Hillside” Vernon and Lillian Pearl Bowles are Kentucky mountain folk, but after Vernon dies, Lillian goes to her sister’s home in Ohio only to grow so homesick for the Kentucky hills that she takes a bus to within 85 miles from home and makes the rest of the journey on foot despite hip pain and an improper proposition.

John Wheatcroft’s “White-Out” is a Kafkaesque and/or Orwellian story told with brilliant detail. I.M. Fels gets an official letter telling him to report to Building 9 where everything is ominously white. He is told to bring his RTL (right to life) card.

“Leaf Curl” by Geoffrey Burns follows Jareb, a fundamentalist who lives in the arid west and always put his trust in God, but when a recession comes and he loses his contractor business and refuses another job because it would require him to join a union, he is forced to work far from home in Nevada; then his wife’s illness back home tests his faith and forces him to reevaluate his notions of what a man is.

An editorial Prelude that discusses two disparate writers—George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh—and two poems by Brian Backstrand round out the issue.