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...
The Garden
Scott Mastro
Squinched to the box-width and eyes-closed purring, garden-shack two-day old shade, each a color-variation of the mother and one another, the runt arrived double-cursed, black. Seven newborns, eight teats; a good chance for survival of all.
The boy understood he could sit and watch but not touch, wanting to roll one off the others, pawing, stretching, the mother shifting every so.
"Leave Nature alone," the old man told him, but he worried for the littlest and he'd take that one if the old man let him.
His fear hidden by the grapevines, the boy said, "I hope nothin' happens to 'em," side-saddled on the door-stoop, head in the wet-smelling interior, legs in the sun.
The old man walked slow and steady, pushing thick glasses up his nose, a blue bandana tied in corners on his head, row by row sunk down from the road, the lower half of the hillside a natural earth-indentation sagging from the mines carved only ten feet below.
Strung down from the house, a hose nourished the lettuce, cucumbers, onions, carrots, peppers, and even the grapevines and the quartet of trees, apple, plum, peach, cherry, but the tomato plants received a bucket each, twice a day.
Leaning into the shack as far as he could, toes anchoring him to the allowable ground, the tips of his tennis shoes drug to the soil, rutting the dry ground, hands on the door-frame supporting him, craning his neck to the kittens, their rising and leveling bodies breathing.
His mother would let him have one she'd said. What would he name it, Galahad, Rooty? His scratched his leg, his weight on one hand. A kitten yawned, a silent sound, tiny tongue and barely teeth, mouth as pink as the edge of the morning sky on the hilltops.
The old man put his bucket down. Here he was near the door.
"Don't go in there."
The boy's body shot back, the sun making him squint, raising his hand as a shield.
The old man sat down under his vines, pulling the bandana from his head, wiping his brow, then the back of his neck. He put the bandana back on his head.
The boy stood, folded his arms, and walked in a circle on his heels.
Up the hill, his mother called. He dropped full-footed to the ground.
"Coming. My mother's gonna' let me have one."
A girl went by on a bicycle. The old man didn't speak. The boy circled on tiptoe looking into the shack. He exhaled.
"My Mom wants me."
He moved in front of the old man squinting, his eyes blurred by thick lenses, scrunching his nose, as if reading the boy's face then looking into the bucket, his Jonah to its whale.
"I'll come when I'm done." The boy lifted his bike off its side, walking it to the gate in the full glare of the sun, the coolness of the shack, the kittens and their dozing mother in his head, clicking the gate behind him and struggling to pedal up the hill, the first few strokes taking all his might.
The sun was hiding in the treetops when the boy returned. He'd hosed the sidewalks and the outside cement walls, tied up old newspapers, and study spelling half an hour. His own little garden he'd watered like the old man, the hose for everything and the bucket for the tomatoes, laying in the shade afterwards, thinking about the kittens.
The old man was closing the gate behind him, a burlap sack dangling from his clenched hand, a chipped brick in the other. He handed it to the boy, the boy pretending it was a bar of gold and he a Brinks guard walking from the armored truck to the bank.
They walked down the rest of the hill, at the two-lane, crossing carefully, the old man's age and load both factors, squinting and wheezing as they started down through the woods. It wasn't fun like delivering gold anymore, just carrying a dumb brick in the woods. His father'd said, "Some people are dumb as a brick." He pretended he was carrying his English teacher's brain, Mr. Wetford. English was boring. Mr. Wetford made sure of it, his droning voice and robotic drills. The boy likened Mr. Wetford's classes to carrying this brick in these woods, the old man walking like Mr. Wetford's classes, the boy's imagination walking on to the river ahead of them.
What was this thing, 'old age', this tired, dragging slowness. The old man was old and his parents were as old as they'd ever be. He'd be a little boy forever, sitting in Wetford's classes an eternity, riding his bike, spraying sidewalks, and now a kitten, to sleep with, to play with and pet, thinking about during Mr. Wetford's classes.
The sun was near down when they reached the water, but its tendrils still laced the sky, making a rim of red of the hilltops edge.
The old man lowered the sack to the ground. He pointed to the brick. The boy gave it, returning Mr. Wetford's brain to a store that would fix it and make it run faster.
The old man placed the brick in the sack and tied a knot in the top.
"Throw it," he said, swimming his hand out over the water.
Now the boy was a strong man in a tossing contest. He lifted the sack so it hung down his back, the knot resting firmly in his grip on his neck. He swirled the sack around him, once, twice, launching it out over the water, a perfect score from the judges, as it slapped the surface and sloshed down under the broken calm, bubbling, gurgling, fighting a moment to stay afloat then folding and disappearing, the boy doing his end-zone victory dance. He looked at the old man standing silent squinting.
The boy thought of the garden shack. The walk back would take years.