CURRENT ISSUE (#50)
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Poetry Selection – Tom Sexton, December 22I don't know the name of the small
Fiction Selection – T. M. McNally, from SwansBeneath the roof of the porch we were safe. We watched the hard rain fall, long silver threads you could easily tangle yourself up in. Threads you could see only in the light from a street lamp or a lone, lit window across the street. Otherwise, the rain was invisible. You could only hear it or see the next day the shape of its drops etched in the paint of your car. Brian played catch with Liz in the street. They stood apart and threw a football: Brian, twenty feet towards the dark: Liz, near my car, clapping, catching the ball once, twice. It was too slippery for her to always grab hold, too big and difficult to see. It dwarfed her hands which, in the light, looked like hopeful wings. She wore a sodden skirt and tank top and no shoes. She threw the ball like a girl. In the rain Brian looked soft. He was in love. Before I knew him, his wife was killed on the Sawmill Parkway, the car squeezed to a box with his wife inside caught between a guardrail and overloaded fruit truck. It took a half-hour to cut through the steel and make a door to pull her out. The traffic, he said, was backed up even longer. The highway was full of peaches which people collected while they waited for the road to clear. |
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