SPRING 2018

Jo Lloyd

Father taught us to respect living things. He would not allow us to tease dogs or cats, or manhandle them, or speak, even kindly, to one that was sleeping. We knew better than to ask for rabbits or white mice, but he did let us keep the small fish we caught in the stream that ran through the woodland at the end of our road. It took twenty minutes to walk to school and two hours to meander back, across the railway and into the trees. The water was clear and cressy. It twitched with tadpoles and whirligig beetles, minnows and loaches and sticklebacks. These last were my favorite. They are a fish . . .

Jim Shepard

Camp near the TN River
Mon. November 21, 1864

Dear Lucy,
It commenced snowing at about dark here, & the wind is as cold as the world’s charity & blowing at a terrible rate. Some of the letters I sent came back. It is very uncertain about letters nowadays, tho I suppose it will do no harm to write more, & I wanted you to know that I’m still right-side up, tho you ought to see me now if you want a hard-looking case. Whiskers have grown out all over & I am ashamed to scan a looking glass. C.W. calls me Chief of the Brigands & looks as . . .

Kathleen Alcott

I won’t tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph—or rather, what was being done to her—just that when I saw it for the first time, in the museum crowded with tourists, she’d been dead five years. It broke an explicit promise, the only we keep with the deceased, which is that there will be no more contact, no new information. In fact, my mother, who was generally kind and reliable in the time she was living, had already broken this promise. Her two email accounts were frequently in touch. The comfort I took in seeing her name appear, anew in bold, almost ou . . .