The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
MontanaI never knew Big Sky Country in the flesh and soil,
feet on the biggest landlocked state, wheels on I-90, but I knew it through the tales of a towering nurse, my lover’s godmother, a woman from Charles County, who fled her Washington college the moment she graduated to heal from the peaks to the plains. She, a blue-eyed girl with black bushy brows, lived with the Crow tribe in a house with no kitchen. Her betrothed, a man back in D.C., wrote her letters about national politics and fine art, while she learned the limits of her training and her faith as a country girl from Maryland. Growing up on Poorhouse Road, this nurse knew golden corn and rusty cows and verdant hills. She did not know the open land, land so flat and land so bare that you could see a tree from miles away. Before her move to Montana, she had only ever seen cowboys on Bonanza and The Unforgiven. Then suddenly they became an everyday sight, so much so that when her fiancé first visited her new home, she took him to a bar where every man wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and the bartender, looking her sweetheart up and down, from his baseball cap to his sneakers, whispered, “You’re not from around here, are you?” The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
JFK on the SofaBy Starling Root QuailBellMagazine.com Saturday night, scratching my boyfriend’s scalp, watching PBS
and there’s another hour special about John F. Kennedy because, of course, the anniversary of his assassination looms over us like the redolence of my mother’s chicken in the living room so I imagine an alternate universe where JFK grew up with TV, solidly middle-class in a Washington suburb, where he’s sitting on the sofa scratching a young Marilyn Monroe’s scalp, eating chicken that falls off the bone and the narrator’s rolling voice lulls them into the story of killing Lincoln The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
When Tina Turner Went SwissBy Belle Byrd QuailBellMagazine.com I spent half my childhood confusing
Sweden for Switzerland like any good, geographically-challenged American kiddo-dee; and Swiss cheese and Swiss chocolate seemed to me the country’s only worthwhile exports, until, of course, I befriended a Swiss girl in tenth grade and she mocked my French and shot me down in Swiss-German, and suddenly Switzerland became more than this snowy place of dairy and confections. That was a decade ago, in the hallways at school, and then, today, Tina Turner went Swiss. But that’s not in the CIA World Factbook or crouching in my memories of Alice. It’s like a rubber band snapped in the rubber band ball my little hands made to represent the globe. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Piper's Christmas GiftAtop the sewers and cobblestone, Herald Square was. Under the thickening snow, Herald Square was. Mary was. Sara was. The girls walked briskly down West 34th Street, dodging the pointed shoes that lunged their way. The men wore bowlers and overcoats, their carpet-bags bulging with gift-wrapped boxes; the women shivered under their shawls, veils pulled down from their feathered hats. They towered above the girls like Yetis, snow piled on their shoulders. Wreaths hung from lampposts that seemed a hundred feet high. Mary clutched the cloth bag that held her precious cargo to her chest, as tightly as Sara held the porcelain baby doll that was her constant companion. You my girl, Cedric had told Mary. You guard this with your life. He entrusted her with the bag. He entrusted her with an address, and a number. If she came back empty-handed he would ball his fists and curse at her. This time he might follow up on his threats to leave them. Mary could hear Sara wheezing as she struggled to keep up. It was the year when the fires consumed San Francisco, although our protagonists knew nothing of this, and would not have cared much. Mary was just north of ten, Sara just south of eight. The smaller girl pressed close to Mary. Her doll was buttoned up in a red pea coat stained with grime, its blue eyes glimmering over a tartan scarf. It amazed Mary how Sara could be such a girl sometimes—fanciful, soft-hearted, distracted by pretty things—but she never failed to followed her big sister’s lead without complaint. She was tiny for her age, hardly bigger’n a johnny plug, with a physical frailty often mistaken for worse ailment. Besides that, she hardly spoke, leading some to think her dull. A necklace made from string, keys, and bits of colored glass bounced around her thin neck. Her soot-black dress had grown sheer enough that Mary could see the brown skin beneath and, in place of her ruined stockings, Sara wore the Sunday Funnies. Boys in bedtime pajamas had adventures all the way up her legs. Mary pulled her sister through a line of chattering patrons outside a box office, banging knees as they went.
“What’re they going to see?” Sara asked. Mary sighed. Here it came. The flood of questions. “They going to see opera,” she replied. “It’s rich people music made by dagos.” Sara scrunched up her face. “I ain’t never met no rich dagos.” When Mary looked up she stared upon chins and the underbellies of umbrellas. Electric lights hovered, watchful and aloof. The theater crowd talked excitedly in German, Italian, and New York dialects. “What about the theaters where we live?” Sara asked, tugging on her sleeve. “Is that what they go to see? Opera?” “Don’t talk about them theaters. They bad places. Only pagans go there.” Bad places that Cedric always stayed around, playing dice by the rathskeller with the other boys. Once in a while the door would groan open and a prostitute would appear like a divine messenger, blessing the chosen boy with a half-dollar to get her cigarettes or chop-suey. Mary knew the melodies to all the popular rags: the Buffalo, the Dill Pickles, the Do Re Mi. “What’s a pagan?” Sara asked. “A pagan’s a person who don’t like God,” said Mary. “They like the Devil. That’s why they go to Hell.” “Have we ever met a pagan?” “Why?” Mary shot back. “You wanna be a pagan? You wanna never get to Heaven? Keep talking that wickedness. See if the Devil don’t hear you.” Mary didn’t notice the Salvation Army bell-ringer until the bell was clanging in her face. She dodged around the woman. A feeling of vulnerability made her stomach go watery. Everywhere she looked were sneering, lipless people who hated her for existing. They might call her a nigger, or kill her. When the opportunity came, she went into the streets, away from the bulk of them. The snow was thin on the cobbles, making pinwheel swirls around her toes. A stiff wind forced Mary to bow her head. Goddamn, it was cold. Nice night for Cedric to send them out while he stayed warm beside the Herald Building. When they met up again (a “ren-dez-vows,” as he called it), Mary had a mind to tell him to go dip his skinny yellow ass in the Hudson, balls first. “Do kids still get born in mangers?” Sara asked her. “Ain’t nobody born in mangers no more,” said Mary. “But they got stables. Can’t the storks drop the baby there?” “Did you say storks? Girl, you strange.” The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
My Great-Aunt's Yellow SofaBy Judith Kelvin Miller QuailBellMagazine.com The Question: Whose person was worthy to repose; Feel the fabric’s intimate caress? Was it queen or emperor or president For whom the sofa would be undressed? The Answer: Plastic protected; awaiting royals; never knew intimacy of touch. In the poet's own words: "I lived my formative years in the diverse universes of an economically poor, ethnically rich Coney Island, Brooklyn and a 1200-people town in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country, out-of-the-ordinary places that taught me anything was possible, and how unique are the paths we all travel. A molecular biologist as well as a writer, I live in a St. Louis, Missouri suburb with my husband, a physics professor. We have one child, a married son who retired from acting (in London) to become a litigation and public defense lawyer, professional improv comic, and dad, in Washington, D.C." The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
And SoldiersBy Christine Stoddard QuailBellMagazine.com The wreath pricked my fingertips and my zipper snagged the red satin and the holly juice stained my scarf but five-year-olds commune with mess. Mama told me to lean the wreath against the hard skin of the tombstone, the one whose face reminded me of Grandpa’s granite stare and granite jaw. One month earlier, I had seen a photograph of Grandpa younger than I am now, standing in his uniform and placing a wreath on his father’s grave on Veterans Day 1975. Snow had fallen and the holly juice wounded the ground. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
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