ISSUES | spring 2011

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34.1 (Spring 2011): "Peril"

Featuring the winners of the 2010 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and work by Patricia Bjorklund, Josh Booton, Sarah Cornwell, Jennifer duBois, Erin Flanagan, Nadine Sabra Meyer, Molly Schultz… and an interview with Jo Ann Beard.

CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

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Nonfiction

Jul 01 2011

On Loneliness

At twenty-two, I joined the Peace Corps. There are plenty of reasons why people do this; some are ill conceived and don’t get shared aloud, perhaps because they can’t be articulated. For me, it was the need to escape what seemed the loneliest feeling in the world: I was in my twenties and sure I’d never be loved, equally sure that no one but I had ever felt this way before. I was years away from reading Lyn Hejinian, who illuminated the direness the woman I was at that time was certain of but couldn’t have expressed. “I would be single all my life and lonely in old age,” she explains of her own thoughts as a young woman. “In such a situation it is necessary to make a choice between contempt and an attempt at understanding, and yet it is difficult to know which is the form of retreat.” My retreat? I left the “Country Preference” line blank on my application and hoped whereever I was sent would be far enough away that nothing could follow me. I was assigned to a small village in the middle of Uzbekistan. It could have been anywhere: Africa or China or South America; it didn’t matter.

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Nonfiction

Jul 01 2011

U.S. and Them, 1971

My father worked in a white T-shirt, off-white overalls and construction boots that were spattered with paint and crusted with Spackle. His fingers looked like wooden spindles, whitish as if they’d been stripped and then antiqued, and no matter how he scrubbed or what he wore, my father always smelled like turpentine: kind of clean and kind of poisonous. Maria said her father was an executive at General Electric. Terri’s father worked at the New York Stock Exchange. Donna told me her dad was a corporate attorney, and I had heard enough. Corporate attorney, commodities trader, CEO: suit-and-tie occupations. With the luxury of sitting behind a desk, my classmates’ fathers might as well be wearing slippers, too. I never went out of my way to tell anyone that my father was a house painter but I never denied him or what he did for a living. Whenever someone asked me who my father worked for, I was happy to announce that he worked for himself. I took pride in the fact that my father really worked for our bread and butter.

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Nonfiction

Jul 01 2011

Helpline

Although we weren’t exactly drug-dependent, at least in terms of how drug dependency had been defined in the mimeographed packet we’d been handed while undergoing volunteer Helpline training, and we weren’t stoners compared to some of our friends who toked even more than we did, most of us who worked shifts at the university’s telephone crisis line smoked a lot of marijuana. We joked that it was an occupational hazard. All that stress. All those panicked calls from people not right at that moment enjoying the effects of their own drugs of choice, or telling us at great length the ways their lives truly and deeply sucked. We lit up the second our shifts were over, often on the way to our cars in the union building parking lot, sharing a joint and, if someone had thought ahead, a bottle of something, anything, alcoholic. And then, weather permitting, adjournment to a nearby city park to smoke and drink some more. All that drug talk on the phone; all that human misery we couldn’t avoid ingesting a fair amount of as it cascaded over the phone: fears of where bad trips were heading, thoughts of suicide, more mundane yet really depressing narratives of loneliness—I’m so ugly, I’m so alone, I’m so pathetic I’m calling you.

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Fiction

Jul 01 2011

The Wrong Man

On the evening of June 17, 1994, when Al Cowlings drove O.J.’s white Bronco fifty miles down I-405 followed by twenty helicopters and god knows how many police cars, I was working in nearby El Segundo, California, at a halfway house for men, debating what to do with the rest of my life. Through the first half of college I had planned to apply to law school, but my parents had gotten me a job at their firm the summer before my junior year, and most of my time was spent in a storage closet searching cases for mention of water rights, which made law school look much less appealing. That fall I took a social work elective on human development and began working with underprivileged children, a job I liked because it suited my nosy nature and gave me the opportunity to tell people what to do. As a lawyer I would only be involved in one side of a case (and a boring one at that, it seemed), with the verdict left in someone else’s hands, but as a social worker, I learned, I’d be making actual decisions with consequences that would better people’s lives. Plus, I wouldn’t have to go to grad school to start practicing. So I switched majors my junior year and started my job a week after graduation.

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Fiction

Jul 01 2011

The City of the Dead

The first time I went to visit Dr. Hill at Park View, I brought him a bouquet of flowers. It would be six weeks before the headstone would be in, and the grave was gutted-looking still, like new gardening. It all looked a little vulgar and exposed, and I didn’t like to look at it straight—though it was true I’d seen Dr. Hill much more exposed than this. “Don’t get used to this,” I said, laying the flowers at his grave. Dr. Hill didn’t respond, but then he’d never been talkative when I knew him in this life, either.

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Fiction

Jul 01 2011

The Floating Life

We cluster around the radio in the teachers’ berth. I twist the dial to 16, the hailing and distress channel, and Dave holds a hand up for silence, even though nobody’s talking. Most of the message is static, but it sounds bad. Ports are closed all along the northern coast of Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Virgin Islands. The throaty, Spanish-inflected voice of the Coast Guard broadcaster tells us to switch to 22A, and we do, straining for specifics of the attack, or whatever it is. I can make out snatches only: stay at sea . . . hazards . . . we don’t know . . . repeat stay . . . as it comes in. The distant sound of hip-hop drifts from the dormitory berths; the students are enjoying a normal afternoon below deck, unaware. The satellites are down. The computers and the handheld devices search endlessly for signals.