Rec Rea Fro Onl Mag

More. Like Moragas and madelaines and De Sades and Defoes and Yoknapatawphas and Yankees and moveable feasts and wrathful grapes and chac-mools and water babies and cold blood and tropics and trilogies and McCuller’s jockey and yeah, believe it or not, eventually, even crap like Jersey Shore and Sister Wives and Kate Plus Eight and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and Flavor of Love, but with Borges-like brains behind them, and much, much better. What it’s about will not be contained or outlasted, connected to the same umbilical cord as the eternal “and so it goes…”

You know. It does.

– The children seemed unhappy when Jasper moved into the nursing home, but it was their decision. Not once did I ask for this to happen. I fed this man, wiping his chin with a paper napkin. I muddled over his medicines and I brushed his teeth and wiped him after he defecated. I held his hand, which had once struck my cheek, bruised my arm, and pulled my hair. I held this hand belonging to this man. He was my husband. I put him in bed and pulled the covers around his shoulders, but I did not linger beside him. While he slept I slipped into the garden, to stand under the maple tree at the end of the day and watch the sun set. – Kimberly Long Cockroft in Apple Valley Review

– Nita’s nose, sensitive since the pregnancy’s first days, told her more about Ash than she wanted to know. His odor included scalp oil, sweat, stale smoke, and substantial amounts of plain dirt—a tamer mixture of the stench that leapt from the street people she was used to passing on Telegraph Avenue. There was another element as well, something dank and sewery that she couldn’t quite place. The whole house reeked of him. – Andrew Wingfield in Terrain.org

– We each of us stepped into a set of light cotton body suits, donned our requisite headgear, our feathered gloves and moleskin booties, and thus I embarked upon the second path of my learning: the way of puzzling, of jigsolving, of fitting one part against another in the hopes that all might hold yet a while longer. – Ryan Call in The Collagist

– Some restless sense of vulnerability about exposing myself in that helpless state normally kept me from sinking all the way down—I couldn’t sleep on airplanes or in libraries, either—and on the rare nights I went home with a woman and the liquor made my thoughts too soggy to create an excuse for leaving, I’d huddle defensively near the edge of the mattress, trying to avoid her sticky presence as I flicked in and out of sleep. – Andy Bailey in Underground Voices

– On Tuesday, on our doorstep, we found an enormous orange cooler packed with dry ice. Inside it, buried in the ice, laid the boneless hindquarters of a deer. This time we mistook it for nothing else, and at night we dined on fine cuts of glazed venison. As we sat down to eat we heard the sounds of my brother arriving from work: the jingle of keys in the lock, his footfall on the carpet. – Carlo Cattaneo Adorno in Flatmancrooked