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ScungyThey told me to never come here after dark, even if it was a shortcut
but I'm not the type to hold my breath in cemeteries and I wanted to see where he died and in the same conditions the black night the fall air in that hour between people getting off from their office jobs and going home to start dinner this was where he made his first tag and scrawled his allegiance meaning that it's where he was born into the life that killed him there were two men with knives and he didn't have the money so they stabbed him and he fell underneath his name creating a pool of red bright enough for graffiti The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Fall of RuritaniaBy Grove Koger QuailBellMagazine.com The Fall of Ruritania; A Personal Account. Hon. Magnus fforde; ed. Anthony Coleman. Foreign Service Press, 2012. 119 p. £29. During the years he served as Great Britain’s ambassador to Bavaria (1901-14), Magnus fforde (as he preferred to spell his name) also represented his county in an adjoining and much smaller kingdom, Ruritania. His duties were not particularly onerous in either case, but he was ideally placed to witness a series of notable events, including the nearly bloodless coup that led to the absorption of Ruritania into Bavaria. It is that coup that is the primary focus of fforde’s narrative. According to editor Coleman, fforde printed an account of the events—for circulation among close friends—after his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1921. Coleman has now augmented that text with a chronology of Ruritania’s tragicomic history and a consideration of the fictional elements introduced by Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and subsequent volumes. Magnus fforde was clearly frustrated by the association in the popular mind of Hope’s works with the real Ruritania and, by extension, with himself. Yet, as Coleman makes clear, fforde’s obvious affection for his “lost” kingdom mirrors the unconsummated romance between Hope’s main characters—Rudolf Rassendyll and the beautiful Princess Flavia. Then again, many of the events fforde describes can only be categorized as “Ruritanian.” These include accounts of the kingdom’s annual waterfall-jumping contest and, in particular, the last known appearance of King Rudolf VIII, who would be remembered as “the Well-Intentioned.” A devotee of aeronautics, philately, and apiculture, Rudolf—accompanied by his faithful Airedale Otis—ascended from a public square one June morning in 1914 beneath a hot air balloon flying the Ruritanian colors, bound for a holiday on the Riviera. However, the monarch was never seen again, and, in the wake of his mysterious disappearance, Bavarian agents disguised as itinerant klezmorim toppled his government and sent his queen into exile. Fittingly enough, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo a few weeks later rang down the final curtain on the Belle Époque that Rudolf and his fellow monarchs so thoroughly epitomized. Grove Koger works as an adjunct reference librarian at Albertsons Library, Boise State University. He is the author of a survey of travel literature, When the Going Was Good (Scarecrow Press, 2002), and has published short fiction in Bewildering Stories, Phantasmacore, Lacuna, Two Words For, Skive, Eternal Haunted Summer, and Scareship.
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Emerald SnowI thought I saw you in the Beaufort Bar
but it was merely a look-a-like. She was an infrared illusion, far- fetched, under sweeping lights. She was close, looked the part to play your ghost, but my chances turned to toast when I asked her if I could call her your name. I thought I saw you in a booth for two tasting gin in McCarthy’s Lair. I drifted closer for a further cue and called to whoever was sitting there. She was close, and she welcomed conversation but the blushes fled her face when I asked her, please, “May I call you her name?” Then I stepped outside to emerald snow and I misdirected my lift home. I heard your soft voice on the radio and told him the long way to go. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Train Station BrideThe train coming 'round the bend reminds me of what lies ahead--
not just rusted tracks and Antebellum rubble but a future of hands alternating between clasping and constructing. We will build and when we must rest from building, we will touch. My ring finger is half the size of yours; your callouses reminders of your labor. My smooth hands hide the callouses on my brain, callouses formed by hours turned into years of research, contemplation, and reporting in a capital rough and muddy, our clam. We hold our wedding day as sacred but also distant-- a calendar date scrawled on an invitation-- despite the fact that we live across the street from the station. We forget it is there like we forget the canal bordering the other face of our apartment. But when a train whistle rides above the cacophony of rumbling trucks and stumbling drunks, I forget the sound of traffic and remember our beginning, the beginning of married life in Shockoe Bottom. Me, your train station bride. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
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Ravenmore Director: Christine Stoddard Actresses: Erica Breig, Luna Lark, Helen Stoddard, and Emily Dalton Photographers: David Fuchs and D.J. Granger Animator: Rinny Wilson Wardrobe Stylist: Nina Stoddard QuailBellMagazine.com Watch it on the big screen at the November James Fiver Filmmakers Forum in Richmond, Virginia.
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Ghost WardEditor's Note: Christine Stoddard and Christine Skelly (yeah, that's Christine squared) are working on an illustrated poetry collection called Ladies of Lore. You might've read some of the poems here on QuailBellMagazine.com since many of them were featured in Photo Tales, but others are brand new! Here's the poem Christine Skelly's most recently illustrated. And we'll be posting info on the forthcoming book soon(ish). At the age of twenty and one,
Eudora shed hot tears over the loss of her father, a Virginian lawyer with lady's hands. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora stumbled to her father's funeral; no one else observed the termination of his years. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora cursed the absence of her peers, howering magnolias over her father's mudded grave. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora told herself not to worry dear, for soon she'd have a protector who'd marry her off. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora coughed up her fears and boarded a black coach for her uncle's Georgian plantation. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora knocked upon a white mansion door, thinking it queer that nobody answered. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora knocked upon the door of the servants' quarters, imagining them huddled over beer. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora, near hopelessness, curled up on a set of plain wooden steps like an urchin in the cold. At the age of twenty and one, Eudora became the ward of a ghost, a single woman enduring jeers in a world of wedded ones. |