The Idea Orphanage

By Michael Ennis

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Here are some thoughts from the Sam’s Club café, where I am enjoying a three-meat pizza and soda combo. I bought them with some loose change. They have, you’ll have to trust me on this, prompted the following line of thinking.

I teach literature, or what’s left of it, and I often make two diametrically opposed rationales for continuing to read literature when no one really seems to care. On the one hand, literature is the last bulwark against consumer capitalism. To read literature from any era keeps our minds alive, resisting the ready-made and reproducible. It brings with it a pleasure wholly outside the immediate gratifications of shiny objects. In other words, literature maintains a contemporary political exigency. It helps us resist the omnipresence of consumerism.…

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Fallen Oranges

By Desirée Jung

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There was this smell, acrid, in her hands. Perhaps it was hopeless to look for her brother at the bar last night. But she needed to tell him that their mother had secrets. Did he know? Yet as soon as she got there, she realized she didn’t really know what she wanted to say. It was just anxiety.

“I know what they did, near the laundry room. There was this acrid smell, remember?” She said, hand warming a whisky cup but not really drinking it.

He was busy behind the counter. Ten years separated the two. She had fast breathing when near him. His image made her think of her father, who had left them when they were young. Now there was nobody else.

“I have to work, Marlene.…

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Why I’m a Bingo Caller in Heaven

By Kimberly Sailor

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The first time my uncle went to a doctor’s office was for his toe tag fitting. Every night after milking the cows, he rang up to the house for an icy glass of Alka-Seltzer. After he
drank it down, clink-slurp-clink, he declared it “good medicine” and started passing out
the creamy cow feed, rich with molasses and corn bits.

As for my cousin, it really came down to all those casino runs. She was a member of the
Poker Army, blitzing through many a floor in Vegas and even those silly midwest “ships”
that are floating in three feet of water, and therefore aren’t violating any statewide
gambling laws. When her bunker was finally blown at 58, she owed a cool $1.2 mil to
the state.…

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If There Is An Afterlife

By Al Maginnes

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For Walter Butts 

The fathers are waiting with their cigarettes and big stomachs for us to arrive. The place where they live does not have time, only space, and they fill it with talks of shortstops and bars, drill sergeants, meals remembered from the days of appetite. Worn jokes about drinking too much and who cares if smoking takes a few years off your life since those are the last years anyway? They talk of their sons, joggers, salad eaters, their strange music and soft hands, the angular jargon of their professions (not jobs). Most will nod, say grudgingly that the kids seemed to come out all right after the crazy stuff with drugs and hair. One will admit he laughed when his son said the kids were driving him crazy.…

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