Pages (PDF): 169
Publisher: The Long Story
Purchase includes: PDF

IN THIS ISSUE

“We’re all orphans in a shadow land, lost and abandoned,” Ingbar, the protagonist in Rex Sexton’s “Trouble Town,” thinks as he sits in jail after a fight. A teenaged orphan working in a grungy, coal-infested place, he wants to be an artist. His drawings have already impressed one of his fellow workers, a black man named Leon, who’s passing them on to an art instructor friend. In the meantime, Ingbar lives in a world of predators and prey, trying to survive bullies like Irish Mike.

“The Silent Child” by Joel Harris is narrated by the brother of a retarded sister and dramatizes a family’s love, frustrations, hopes, disappointments and small triumphs dealing with a child “struggling toward an awareness that would always elude her.”

“Judgment Day” by Danielle Metcalf: When a raging fire in rural Nebraska threatens to cause a gas tank to explode and people are evacuated, only Doris Grimmett remains behind. Obsessed with guilt from losing her parents as a child and certain God is angry with her, she awaits her fate, but Officer Sammy Wright, who knew her as a boy, endangers his own life in an effort to save her.

Meagan Ciesla’s “The Tallest Men, the Broadest Shoulders” is a tall tale indeed, an allegory, a fable, where Babe the blue ox coughs up five huge 30 foot Pauls who cut timber very efficiently for a boss afraid of losing them and where “eco-terrorism” offers a strange twist to the narrative.

Ronald M. Gauthier’s “Modern Black Boy” is a story that dramatizes how small individual victories play as large a role in advancing racial justice as mass demonstrations. Joshua Miller, librarian in a suburb of Atlanta, fights to keep open the library used by black people when the town has to economize and finds some surprising allies in this fight.

Tom Yori’s “TnT Moving” offers a picture of working class life appropriately written in a lively vernacular style while dramatizing the ethos of those who find a tough job is a chance to prove themselves.

Mark Rigney’s “Roll With It,” set in northeast Africa in October 1993 (time of Black Hawk Down), follows Sara, a news correspondent, and her male companion, Gil, as they deal with native people, Somalian pirates and American soldiers in an effort to get into Somalia to get a good story.

“Little Alice” by Georgina Phillips is a compelling story that atomizes the way many single women are patronized and often humiliated while simultaneously dramatizing the protagonist’s yearnings and personal dignity.

Poems by Kathy Fitzgerald, Paul Nelson and John Wheatcroft and an editorial Prelude exploring the differences between sociological and humanistic insights round out the issue.