(CONTEMPORARY) Woods-Western-Mountain-Appalachian
DECEMBER 2018
OLD HIGHWAYS
ALEX PICKENS
~
I found Silas sitting by the stream in the bottom of the narrow valley. When I was a kid I used to go down to that valley, past the rusting shells of cars half-sunk in the weeds, careful not to get too close to them because my mother had warned me about rattlesnakes and foxes that made their homes there. Rattlesnakes scared me. I never saw a fox, except once in the winter moonlight when a silvery apparition glided across the yard. Silas told me they were ghosts, and I probably believed him.
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OLD HIGHWAYS
ALEX PICKENS
~
I found Silas sitting by the stream in the bottom of the narrow valley. When I was a kid I used to go down to that valley, past the rusting shells of cars half-sunk in the weeds, careful not to get too close to them because my mother had warned me about rattlesnakes and foxes that made their homes there. Rattlesnakes scared me. I never saw a fox, except once in the winter moonlight when a silvery apparition glided across the yard. Silas told me they were ghosts, and I probably believed him.
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OCTOBER 2018
THE VISITOR
MAUREEN SHERBONDY
~
Everyone told Tevin that it would be difficult to meet women in his chosen profession. Not so much because of the job itself, but where he might live as a result of being a forest ranger. He’d hoped to get a job in the Pine Barrens or somewhere else in his own state. In a crowded place like New Jersey, even if he lived on-site in the Pine Barrens, women were just a few Parkway exits away. But there were no openings in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut the year he graduated from Rutgers. So here he was in upstate New York, miles and miles from civilization.
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THE VISITOR
MAUREEN SHERBONDY
~
Everyone told Tevin that it would be difficult to meet women in his chosen profession. Not so much because of the job itself, but where he might live as a result of being a forest ranger. He’d hoped to get a job in the Pine Barrens or somewhere else in his own state. In a crowded place like New Jersey, even if he lived on-site in the Pine Barrens, women were just a few Parkway exits away. But there were no openings in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut the year he graduated from Rutgers. So here he was in upstate New York, miles and miles from civilization.
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MAY 2018
PINWHEELS
EMILY MATHIS
PINWHEELS
EMILY MATHIS
“I thought Sampson ran away from me the other night, Lily. I couldn’t find him all night. He’s never run off before like that. I don’t know what got into him,” Crow told her early one morning in February. She hadn’t seen him in a week. It was the longest time they’d been apart since this ritual had started. She knew her ’97 Camry couldn’t make it up the dirt road in the snow, but she worried constantly that week that he thought she had abandoned him. She was right, though he’d never say it. The absence of her, the cold, the morning waits for no one, Sampson running off – all of it had taken his mind into a tunnel he couldn’t find his way out of alone.
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APRIL 2018
THE HARVESTER
AMANDA CRUM
APRIL 2018
THE HARVESTER
AMANDA CRUM
The old man walked along the border of his property, feeling the cold squish up through his boots like a rising damp. There was nothing here but scrub and fallen tree limbs, tangled together in a fractured web, but something about the edge of his land came as a comfort in the dying days of autumn. Here was a view of the last forty years of his life, breakback and hard-fought. If he stood at the edge of the barn and looked west, he could almost see the entirety of his parcel floating in waves, undulating rows of wheat stubble bowing to the sunset. He didn’t need photographs or old letters. Here was the seed of his memory, tucked deep down into the velvety soil.
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NOVEMBER 2017
CHARMED
BEN WHITE
CHARMED
BEN WHITE
Today would be the day. Selection day. No one believed him because they were all just a bunch of snakes casting forth their evil onto him without consideration of his ability. But today; today would be the day.
When he was little, he had heard the footsteps in the woods, and a fear inched along his skin making him crawl into the thicket with his muscles tightened into a coil waiting silently for the booted crunching of leaves and sticks to pass. He hated the feeling, while the teasing of the others made him want to slither away into his loneliness and disappear.
If only he could get the chance to face that fear again. Then he would show everyone his courage. The courage of old, told so many times in so many ways to reflect the culture of pride and natural fortitude.
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