ISSUES | spring 1997

20.1 Cover (Full-Size)

20.1 (Spring 1997)

Featuring winners of the 1997 Editor’s Prize and work by Samuel Atlee, Walter Bargen, Jamie Callan, William Greenway, William Harrison, Laura Henrikson, William Holtz, Ron Johnson, Willoughby Johnson, Anthony Burke Lee, Deena Linnett, Anne Miano, G.K. Wuori, and an interview with Lewis Nordan.

CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

20.1 Cover

Nonfiction

Mar 01 1997

Two Fingers

My father died under the surgeon’s knife on the morning of June 12, 1957, one day short of his forty-seventh birthday. He had been obviously and continuously ill for three years, and in that time we had finally come to understand the occasional frightening spells of weakness that would clamp down on him in the years of his manhood. Sometime as a child he had contracted rheumatic fever; it had damaged the mitral valve of his heart, constricting the flow of blood and overburdening the heart muscle. After years of abuse, the heart was failing.