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No Others Before Me

June 12, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

31-2coverMaria Hummel’s short story “No Others Before Me” appeared in NER 31.2:

Laura’s labor was long and difficult, not because it was hard to squeeze the villagers out, but because several of them tried to climb back in. After their town finally collapsed into a mud of placental fluid around them, they sat in the muck, rubbing their skinny arms. They submitted to being prodded by the doctors and lay listlessly on the mattress while Laura and I cooed at them.

“Give them as much body contact as possible,” advised the nurse. So we spread them out like Christmas ornaments all over Laura’s naked belly and thighs. They curled. They sighed. Then finally one fellow reared his head and pronounced his new world cold and inhospitable. He told the others that they were being punished for exploiting their paradise in the womb.

“It’s okay, little guy,” Laura said, in a voice I had never heard before. It was gentle and singsong and full of authority. She guided the man toward her breasts. “It’s okay.

After a good feed, he revised his opinion and called out to his brethren about a land of milk and honey. Laura pulled the others to her and they waited their turn in a cranky huddle. 

“See?” she said to me, her eyes glistening with tears.

I nodded. I saw. They needed her. All that tugging and sucking. All those itty-bitty sounds. This was what my beautiful wife had wanted: to be everything to them. And my job was to make it possible for her.

I drove them home in three car-seats, each with eight snug pockets where the villagers rode and tossed their arms at their mama.

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Swarm

May 29, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

nick flynn4From Nick Flynn’s poem “Swarm” (NER 23.1).

Cosmos. Lungwort. Utter each

& break

into a thousand versions of yourself.

You can’t tell your stories fast enough.
The answer is not one, but also

not two.

[read the poem]

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Grim Tales

May 15, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

Norman Lock’s short story “Grim Tales” appeared in NER 23.4:

The trees now grew without observing any longer the limits assigned them by nature. They reached into the sky until they looked out over “the floor of heaven.” Recalling the old story, boys climbed them. Not only boys but men and even some old men who wished for gold. One by one they fell–the old men and the young, and the boys, too–not one of them having reached the top branches let alone the floor of heaven. Instead, they fell, all of them, earning for themselves neither wealth nor fame, only death at the foot of the unruly trees. And still the trees continued to grow without regard for the limitations of their kind until the roots tore from the ground and the earth was broken into pieces and destroyed.

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Insomnia

May 1, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

From Henri Cole’s poem, “Insomnia” (NER 23.3).

Storm_Wellington_HarbourDear unnatural Ariel, I loved him, 
the island setting, the auspicious revenge—
how could I resist? The rain came down, 
filling up time like sand or human               understanding. 

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Red Herring

April 3, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

450px-Terrasse_d'un_café_de_Paris-Paul_Munhoven“Red Herring,” by Tomás Q. Morin, appeared in NER 32.2.

I say “my love” in a reluctant French,
even though I hate the French, not the people
who never did me harm, just the nectar-hearted
sounds of mon amour, mon chérie, that always
live in the right mouth on the brink
of tumbling into beauty, a sad truth
revealed to me when I overheard a socialite
ordering a café noisette on the Champs-Élysées
with the same river of honey
spilling from the lips of a street vendor
offering directions to the nearest toilet.

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All of a Sudden

March 20, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

399px-girlCarla Panciera’s short story “All of a Sudden” appeared in NER 25.3:

I imagined Albinna trolling the aisles of the dime store, the sleeves on a denim jacket her brother’d outgrown rolled over her thin wrists. The saleswomen, older than our mothers, sweaters around their shoulders cape-like, would follow after her expecting her to pocket lip gloss or musk, things she fingered or picked up to smell. There was nothing she thought of stealing. But who else would have known that about her? 

I stopped going places without her. I felt a generous love for her and for myself loving her. When she couldn’t go somewhere because she was ironing curtains, she’d been out that day already, she had to get lettuce at the store, I stayed home, my mother asking: Where’s Albinna today? 

We’d found a rusting truck cap in a back field and dragged an old coffee table into it. She brought a candle and once we tried cigarettes there. Days without her, I’d sit there myself, bring the dog, find something to use as a vase and fill it with wild chamomile. 

You could ask another friend over, my mother said, but I had no wish to do that. 

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Our Agreement

February 27, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

Andrew Day’s short story, Our Agreement, appeared in NER 26.2:

Red_Square_in_Moscow_at_Night

Then one night she showed up alone, and sat down next to him, and said Hi, in English, in an accent he knew wasn’t Russian. By the time her friends came, he’d been talking to her for an hour. He was nice to them, her fellow language-school students, even the over-polite German guy whose heart she was obviously breaking. He bought them a couple of rounds of beers. She ignored the group. The few times they came in after that, they sat by themselves, and talked more quietly than before, without laughing so much.

Her drink hasn’t come. He motions to Yasha, who’s settling up with some guys at the other end of the bar. Yasha nods.

Last Friday, they were sitting right here, at just this time, 2:30, looking at one another in a way they’d grown accustomed to, at the ends of nights, a little drunk, giddy, knowing that in a few minutes they’d be in the back of a cab, kissing, as they sped through the nineteenth-century streets, and in ten minutes they’d wake the night watchman at her place, knocking on the grimy glass door with a ruble coin, giggling as he stumbled toward them to open up, and then they’d ride up in the rickety elevator, kissing some more, she stroking his neck and the close-cropped hair on the back of his head, his hands resting on the soft skin around her waist, and then they’d get to the top floor and go into her apartment and she’d drop her keys on the kitchen table and lead him to the living-room window, where they’d undress one another, slowly, still kissing, by the light of the moon, the sleeping city spread below them.

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Love Story

February 13, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

kaddish

“Love Story” by Rachel Kadish appeared in NER 28.2.

 No friends attended the funeral. The gathering was limited to the children, their spouses, Milton’s two infant grandsons, and Dorothy, whose reddened eyes were almost handsome against her primly buttoned black dress. That afternoon the attorney informed the children, with an admirably blank expression, that the house and funds had been left to Dorothy. The children received nothing.

They sorted his possessions. Dorothy volunteered to do it but the children were unanimous in their refusal. This was, after all, the apartment where they had grown up. They were, after all, now orphans. The three knelt on worn cushions and, complaining of balky knees, bent brown-gray heads together over the shoeboxed remains of their grade-school careers. By turns prickly and obliging, they took shifts sifting the slim leavings of their parents’ lives. In their father’s dresser drawer the younger son found a loose stack of unfolded pages dense with a plump handwriting he recognized from Dorothy’s grocery lists. After reading aloud the salutation the son could not bear to continue so handed them to his wife, who read half the small sheaf before handing them back with a rueful laugh and the report that Dorothy’s letters were chock-full of impetuous vows and misspelled poems. The wife had stopped reading at the poem that ended I tern up all my flowers in your hands. The son sneaked the pages into Dorothy’s dresser and left them there.

[read the story in full]

 

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The Garden of Earthly Pain and Pleasure

January 30, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics

Alfred_Hitchcock_NYWTSJohn A. Bertolini considers criticism of Hitchcock’s Psycho in NER 31.3 (Bertolini’s essay was published as the classic movie turned 50 in 2010):

As Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho has now arrived at the age of fifty, the moment seems propitious for a reconsideration of the film’s significance and staying power. In The Moment of Psycho, David Thomson has used the occasion to situate this film in cinema history, and indeed in America’s larger cultural history. But Thomson’s unpleasant little book makes some rather large claims regarding the impact on movies of Hitchcock’s virtuoso exercise in cinematic anxiety. He charges Hitchcock with making a “breakthrough” in Psycho that led all of us, and filmmakers in particular, to take “bloodletting, sadism, and slaughter” for granted, to treat sex and violence ironically or mockingly, because they “were no longer games,” “but were in fact everything.” “Everything”? As Hitchcock himself might ask, “Whatever does the gentleman mean?”

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Surely You Know

January 16, 2013 by
Categories: NER Classics


Victoria Chang’s poem “Yang Gui-Fei” appeared in NER 25.3:

Surely you know I will rule your besieged kingdom in the afterlife,
build the rivers so they flow into a great bath,

populate the land with plum trees, foliate the skies
with golden birds.

Once I was more than a woman, more than a gold hair-pin,
more than three thousand bathing concubines.

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