Criticism. Essay. Fiction. Science. Weather.
week:
1A piece removed. 2Come eat it.
Or don't. 3Wine, Shoulder, Bolt, Socket. 4Mothbombs 5On the road with your only soul. 6One woman's trash is another woman's treasure 7Aliens! Right here in America! 8It's not as crazy as it sounds
or, music is as music does 91) Sign.
2) Hope for the best. 10A friendship in a bottle. 11A five-year-old tries his hand at action adventure. 12Will the circle be unbroken. 1390ways' first Quaterly Review rages on:
2 samples of Fiction. 14Muscles and fat.
A thin layer of sweat. 15Fiction goes serial.
Part 1 has sex and drugs.
You know you want to stay tuned. 16Our fiction serial concludes to cure your
vertigo from last week's cliff-hanger. 17An iced-out 21-speed sensation: The Moves are
all up on your handlebars. 18We're all in this together.
Except those bastards in administration. 19Jilted, laughed at,
and in the air. 20Swirling and swirling... 21You can't make yourself like them, but you have to pretend because they are your family. 22How well do jewel cases retain odor?
About as well as you stink. 23It's black and white. It's old world.
It's photo time. 24Piggy calls, wanting to sell you insurance.
This is what's on the other end of the line. 25A long pause, then, 26Fiction's Second Qaurterly Review
can speak Italian. 27It's only bread, after all. 28It's job search time at 90ways. 29George W. Bush's resting heart rate and a bum in a green sweater. 30Antique weaponry and teenage angst.
Together at last. 31One-hundred-fifty-three syllables
of October fun. 32there is only
self 33She's cold to the touch.
Cold and pebbly. 34Gut-wrenching love.
And wallabies. 35Building a habit out of ivies and orange flowers. 36A 90ways exclusive sneak peak at the
new and groundbreaking Alphabet Book. 37Type it with one hand and
see what happens 38A face any susbsitence farmer could love. 39The Quarterly Review: read it again for the third time. 40For every task, someone is the best.
Sometimes that's impressive. 41I didn't get a computer;
I moved to Indiana. 42A piece removed. 4390ways has new concerns about identity theft. Lock up the children and your sense of self. 44time. eyes. deep sighs. 45I know there's a place 4690 stars are born. 47I had to ask. 48It's about sex.
But isn't that always the way with classical music? 49The epistolary form in the 21st century.
Complete with neuroses and unpunctuation. 50There is no end to the party. 51Rockin to the sweet sounds of prepared food. 52Of or pertaining to. 53Including spaces, this blurb is 90 characters. Ways, words, characters. It is a leitmotif. 54Minnesota. Miami. Poetry in 90ways' Fiction.
It's the best of all worlds. 55It lives and breathes and is hungry for carnival food. 56A piece removed. 57The curtain is being pulled back... 58Up in the Fiction house! It's a bird. It's a plane.
It's an illustralogue! 59The hat, in all honesty, is a private matter. 60Putting up with all the doth. 6190words strike terror into the hearts of the longwinded. 62Return of the illustralogue! 63Take one down, pass it around,
blow your nose. 64A piece removed. 65The First Quarterly Review wants
you to meet its little friend. 66From our servers to your ear buds!
It's misguided enthusiasm, in podcast form! 67Questions for the man himself.
Plus, the podcast adventure continues. 68No one would ever use Starbucks
to define their identity. Right... 69Don't you remember the rose clipped under my windshield wiper like a butterfly under a pin? 70Oh, it's nothing.
Oh, it's life-threatening disease. 71It's not you. It's me.
And my Eurasian captors.
72Root, root, root for the brisk
sale of anything possible. 73Look within the very bowels of the soul.
Or at least your mother. 74We're not strangers any more. 75He knows of what he speaks. 76I find that often times I'm quite
mature enough to enjoy a few beverages. 77He is licking me.
I don't like it one bit. 78Our favorite stuff is coming 'round the mountain, again. 79A wooden-back brush and a homemade bowl of oatmeal. 80A man's home is his... 81Fack to the Buture. 82This dude pulled back on his nose
and mucus and unleashed a city. 83The polls are in. 93% of respondents do not approve of the monkeybone lodged in their lower lip 84Like a thirsty man in the desert 85Taxpayer dollars wasted on broken egg. News at eleven. 86She loves her red octopus.
She will chew it to death. 87Bubbling, gurgling, fighting a moment to stay afloat. 88Molting our pasts into the air... 89The Return of 90 Words 90It comes but once a... ever. 91Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, the end of the Fiscal Quarter. 92The 540 word circle is now unbroken. 93An emptying out of the animus, perceived as tranquility
94All roads lead to South Dakota. Or at least the I-90 does, anyway. 95He laid down his whittling knife and he and his brother took up arms in rage. 96Drinking manhattans made with a good bourbon, and strong. 97Living white and pudgy, I never expected much for myself. Now, I could tell that was true. 98A few gestural lines towards the thought of death. 99Rest in peace.
I know I will. 100And then we played baseball and then we played army and then we were best friends. 101We torn holes in sheets and became ghosts for each other's pleasures. 102I looked at the pictures of you, twenty years old,
sometimes skinny and sometimes your face a soft moon.
103Fingers clutching little trinkets of the day... 104All roads lead to South Dakota. Or at least the I-90 does, anyway. 105Everywhere signs of an interstice arriving. 106What you see and what you believe are two different things. 107It was as if a million literary ghosts poured from its pages, moaning to be set free. 108So what if too many times we have been here, both
lost in our machinations...
Candlelight
Erica Ray
I sat across from my father in the dimly lit restaurant that felt like September. Curling up into my sweater, I wrapped the wings of my cardigan around my body, and tucked the edges up under my arms, burying my shoulders into the seat's embrace. There was a time when my father remembered that he loved this place -- an eclectic restaurant nestled on Main Street between a grocer I've never seen open and an antique shop that smells like memories hidden in a grandmother's basement. The large paned windows of the restaurant reveal the footprints of the conversation inside, the condensation lingering in the corners of the glass like a shy child. Through the window I can see the lamp lit street outside -- the rutted road shadows the contours of a river that once created this town. The very tips of autumn blown branches line this paved boundary --proud sentries guarding their own set of secrets. Behind the tree line I can see the small, artificial "logging" islands stranded in the middle of the river -- neglected gravestones honoring and echoing a way of life barley remembered.
I watch my father eat the dinner he forgot he ordered -- his British roots honored by his meticulous use of his knife and fork. He is wearing his favorite sweater, the one he has begun to hide between his mattress and box spring. As I watch him, I think about our life together. I picture the gully across from our house where he would take me to fly kites on windy Sunday afternoons. I remember our winter evenings together when I would sit on the blue-tiled kitchen counter of our drafty apartment and watch him mix bouillon with boiling water and dust pieces of beef with flour in a brown paper bag. I remember how he would brush my hair before bed with a scarred, wooden-back brush that once belonged to his mother and read to me until my eyelids became too heavy to hold open. I remember how he would greet me in the morning with a bowl of homemade oatmeal -- the sugar-dusted oats peeking out from a warm pool of milk -- and how he would hold me on his lap when I cried.
He glanced up from his meal and smiled across the table, his familiar warmth captured in the lines of his eyes. For a moment I forgot. For a moment I pretended that life can be where you left it -- in the spaces you've hidden away. Within the gaze of those same eyes I am reminded of that soulful place where true sorrow wears silence. I realized that I too have the shadows beneath my mattress -- that safe place where I stow away all that I am afraid will be stolen. The place where I keep the things I don't want to lose.
Looking into his eyes I smiled back, a single, truant tear escaped down the side of my face, hidden by the candlelit shadows that danced upon our table. They cast their shadows across the white table cloth that rested in our laps, across the curvature of my empty wine glass, and as they began their waltz across my father's face, they lingered for a poignant moment around the corners of his eyes as if honoring the wisdom and the tragedy of a mind that has begun to hide memories for its final hibernation. I suddenly recognized his vulnerability in the pronounced veins that weaved across his hands, in his desire to protect me from his forgetfulness, from his sadness -- his desire to protect me from my own sadness.
After the waitress cleared our plates, I walked my father to the bathroom and sat in the straight-back chair outside the men's room. I could hear the happy din of the restaurant -- a chorus of clinking glasses and light laughter. It seems strange that the world just goes on without us, never looking back to see if we've caught up. I wanted to feel wise in my sadness. I wanted to feel embraced by the calloused hands of a world that has never not known tragedy. But instead I sat alone and waited.
Again seated beneath the waltz of the candlelight, my father asked me about my life. I hesitated for a moment, and as I began to talk my father noticed something beyond me that captured his attention. A ballad mournfully echoed from the next room as I watched his beautiful mind leave our table. His brow furrowed with concentration as if he couldn't quite see or understand what he was looking for. I let the last word of my sentence fall off the edge of my lips. After a lifetime of moments he turned back to me, and with concern in his eyes he asked me if my father was still alive. I tried to smile as I met his eyes, hoping that the softness of my expression might return him to me. "You are my dad," I said.
"Oh right, I... I must have got you confused... with... I don't know." As his eyes looked into mine, I could see the love and the terror both fighting for recognition.
"I love you dad," I said, trying again to smile. As I reached out for him with both my hands his frightened eyes filled with tears. I put my arms around him and held on as only he had taught me.
That night as I drove home along the rutted Main Street, I looked again through the leave-strewn branches at the tiny, logging islands, stranded in the middle of the water desperately trying to withstand the current of a river that always threatens to wash them away... and finally cried.