Pages (PDF): 162
Publisher: The Long Story
Purchase includes: PDF

IN THIS ISSUE

When Mrs. Czernicki asks her black teenaged neighbor, Johnquell, to move a heavy shelf upstairs in Jennifer Morales’s “Heavy Lifting,” a tragic accident occurs that becomes the occasion to explore the isolation of the elderly and the potential for intergenerational and interracial friendships.

In “A Chilly Peace” by Linda Behrendt, Leo Daluski is a Vietnam veteran struggling to rediscover the thread that gives balance and texture to life. His sister, Charlene, and niece, Madeline, are what hold his world together as he seeks to find again the calm of routine and normal things, but when they move away Leo must decide whether he will continue to engage his family for support or accept a peace of mind that instead comes only from retreat.

Forest Arthur Ormes, “Deportee”: Courtney Gerard, an orphaned alcoholic dry for twenty years, traumatized Korean War veteran, and orphaned son of a Jewish father and Czech Catholic mother, has a more than the ordinary share of inherited demons as he takes a trip to Europe with his wife to search for his roots.

“I understand the comfort of dogs,” the narrator in Clara Stites’s “A Story for My Father,” says, and in the course of delineating her relationships with her long-estranged father and dying husband, one of the main things that holds her together is the joy that dogs, living in the present, bring into human lives.

Jamey Gallagher’s “A Closer Walk with Thee” dramatizes a terrible situation—a mother awaiting her son’s execution for murder— with deeply felt humanity.

Anthony R. Lusvardi’s “One Week in Africa” is a powerful story that enters into one of the dark places in the human soul. Joel, the narrator, accompanies a group of college students on a field trip to Rwanda several years after the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda’s Tutsis by the Hutu dominated government and finds the legacy of that holocaust inescapably omnipresent. Trying to make sense of this horror, at one point he wonders if mankind were put on trial for the Rwandan genocide, the Nazis and all the other horrors of history, could Shakespeare and Botticelli be witnesses for the defense?

Victor Walker’s “Southside Girl” follows Ronnie as she the grows into adulthood caught between the rural life her grandparents knew in Arkansas and the life black people found in the north, and as she enters college she further confronts the momentous changes the Civil Rights movement and Black Liberation were bringing to Afro-Americans.

Poems by William Davey, John Wheatcroft, Jared Carter, Laurel Speer, Kathy Fitzgerald, and Sonja Skarstedt, and an editorial PRELUDE that discusses King Arthur, Henrik Ibsen, William Faulkner, and Emily Dickinson round out this issue.