By Dustin Nightingale

Featured Art: New York Lunch Counter by Walker Evans

Needs and Hopes

I want $50,000 a year with insurance, incentives such as stock
options, 401K, paid paternity leave, sick days, two months off
in the summer, and a company car with a gas card. I expect a
healthy work environment, void of inspirational quotes like
Inspiration overtop of an eagle in the snow. My colleagues
will not try and josh me, nor will they throw potlucks or invite
me to 4th of July cookouts and then think I’m an uppity jerk
when I don’t attend. They will not show me pictures of
something they recently pushed or pulled out of their uterus.
Nor will they tell me about the book they want to write based
on their own life. What they will do is mumble lines of Emily
Dickinson to themselves while staring out a window. They
will bring in a bag of cayenne peppers they grew this summer,
leave it on the break-room table with a sign that says Free
—take what you want. And I will take three. I will let them
dry, grind them up, and place them in the plastic of a cigarette
wrapper, which I will pinch into stir-fries during a very
long and cold winter. And I will try to do the same for them.

Previous Experience

Oh I’ve done that. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve done that.
Have you? Well you should try it sometime, just to see what
you’re capable of and for how long. I mean, why not see what
it takes to make you wake up crying. And then of course, what
it takes for you to stop. So when can I start? Or have I already?

By Denise Duhamel

Featured Art: Frozen Foods with String Beans, New York by Irving Penn

We stopped at a restaurant that advertised steak dinners for $3.99. My father
was excited—he loved red meat. We were on vacation. My sister, my mother, my
father and I were all going to splurge. My father double-checked his billfold and
said, “Let’s go!” The waitress asked if we wanted the special. Yes indeed. Would
we like potatoes? Sure, why not? And creamed spinach? And bread? You bet.
When the bill came, my father blanched. He whispered to my mother he didn’t
have enough in his wallet. He called the waitress to our table and reminded her
of the sign outside. She explained that each steak was indeed $3.99, but that all
the sides we ordered were another dollar each. My father said she should have
been more forthcoming. She brought us a menu. My father asked to see the
manager, who pointed to the phrase à la carte. My mother dug in her purse, but
my father told her to stop. He stood up and put sixteen dollars (a ten, a five, and
a one) on the table—not even covering the tax and certainly no tip. “I’m not being
swindled for a baked potato,” he said to the managerand walked out. “I’m
sorry,” my mother sulked, pulling my sister and me out of the booth. I looked to
the floor, the swirly carpet. “Sir, you can’t do that,” said the waitress. “Ma’am,
I’m serious. You can’t do that,” echoed the manager. “Hey, come back, we’ll
take a personal check.” All the way to the Cape, I thought the police would
pull us over, the unpaid-for potatoes and spinach making me full and groggy.
My mother and father fought—“I’ve never been so embarrassed . . . ” and “Too
bad. I’m no chump.”—before all went silent. My sister and I dug out the steak
from between our teeth with our tongues. After a day or so, the shame turned
to laughter. My mother said, “I guess you showed them.” And my father said,
“I sure did.” By the end of the week we were proud, our story about standing
up to touristy rip-offs, about snobs only pretending to be French, about how we
were living le rêve américain.

By Marjorie Celona

Featured Art: Street by Romare Bearden

It is, at first, a linguistic seduction:

                                   On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned
                                   to be ashamed of my mother,

If you’ve ever lived near the ocean, perhaps you, like me, equate one or more dependent clauses at the beginning of a periodic sentence to a wave gaining amplitude before it crashes on the shore. It’s a rudimentary metaphor: the wave builds, and by the time we get to the period at the end of the sentence it has crashed. There is a rhythm to the periodic sentence, and it’s near impossible not to be pulled into it. With its sly promise to deliver something remarkable, that first dependent clause—On an otherwise unremarkable September morning—   is a somewhat seductive lead in its own right. But it is the second dependent clause—long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother—that gives us our first glimpse into the story’s retrospective, mournful heart. If you’re anything like me (lousy metaphors aside), even at this early point the story has you in its grasp. The rest of the sentence, in conjunction with the story’s title, fulfills the tension by providing a simple explanation for what the story will be about:

                                   . . . she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin
                                   my very first day of school.

By David Lehman

Featured Art: Ventana de Radiografías by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

The first paragraph of “Under the Garden,” Graham Greene’s finest story, consists of just two sentences:

                                  It was only when the doctor said to him, “Of course the fact that you
                          don’t smoke is in your favour,” Wilditch realized what it was he had been
                          trying to convey with such tact. Dr. Cave had lined up along one wall a
                          series of X-ray photographs, the whorls of which reminded the patient of
                          those pictures of the Earth’s surface taken from a great height that he had
                          pored over at one period during the war, trying to detect the tiny grey seed
                          of a launching camp.

With the indirection that passes for a physician’s professional “tact,” the masterly opening sentence reveals that the protagonist, a man named Wilditch, has just been handed a death sentence. Greene’s opening dwells on the doctor’s discomfort with speaking the bald truth (“what it was he had been trying to convey”), his determination to skirt the subject, with the result that the bitter prognostication of the man’s demise dawns on the reader in the same way that it dawns on Wilditch: belatedly, like the answer to a riddle or trick question. Or so it feels: Greene gets us right into the mind of his protagonist at the moment of revelation. Read More

By Alyson Hagy

Featured Art: Pasturage by André Dunoyer de Segonzac

                                                                                                      Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was 
                                                                                                      alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that
                                                                                                      she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression 
                                                                                                      was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her
                                                                                                      eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned
                                                                                                      as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. . . .

                                                                                                                                        —“Good Country People,” Flannery O’Connor

I’m sorry to say I’ve experienced my share of bible salesmen. And I can’t think of the names Joy or Hulga without wincing with delight. But why have I never gotten over the way O’Connor begins “Good Country People”?

I blame front porches.

By Tom Noyes

Featured Art: Boy with Pitcher By Édouard Manet

                                                                                                   I’m Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies,
                                                                                                   dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear
                                                                                                   glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and
                                                                                                   kids who pass pencils and water the plants—and cripples, espe-
                                                                                                   cially cripples. I love nobody loved.

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster writes about the necessity of “bouncing” the reader. At the beginning of a work of fiction, he suggests, the writer must win the reader’s attention in such an immediate, all-encompassing way that the reader has no choice but to forget herself and her “real life” circumstances in order to abide fully and uninterruptedly in the imagined world of the fiction. If the writer can’t bounce the reader from the one world to the other right quick, all is lost.