by Gabriella Herkert

The world has been a pretty confusing place in the last year. Wars and recession. Weapons of mass destruction and SARS. Pretty much everything after the World Trade Towers fell has seemed big and dark and scary. Now it’s time to elect a President again and in a world with so much tragedy and insecurity I couldn’t imagine being irreverent. I reread this piece, written pre-9/11, when the election of the leader of the free world seemed a time for irreverent comment. Maybe it’s time to let the laughter back in. Then again, maybe I was just before my time. Here is my political manifesto:

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by Robert Levin

I was, I suppose you could say, in a prepartum depression.

It started when my wife, Connie, decided it was time to have a baby. I was thirty-one and she was twenty-eight, a circumstance which, I reminded her in my argument against the idea, was no cause for alarm. But after she’d voiced her ambition’and thereby made it real to herself’the achievement of motherhood became an obsession for her, and she would not leave me alone about it. Finally, after several months, my reluctance to enlist in her project compelled her to resort to a not so veiled threat: “Steven, she said. “Either we have a baby now or I’m going to leave you.”

All right, I told her, get off the fucking Ovril then.

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by Jennifer Spiegelwords words words books
There’s something about the bar that reminds me of Texas.

We arrive in Graskop, a quaint town in the Eastern Transvaal. Little shops and a place to get pancakes are the main attractions. We look at art galleries during the day and go to a bar at night.

Inside the bar, everyone’s Afrikaans. ‘They look like rednecks.’ Dylan claims a pool table while she looks around. There’s an abundance of denim, reddish complexions, and cigarette packs sticking out of back pockets.

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by Jennifer Spiegel

mosquito net chocolate Hluhluwe

I’m the girl who gets the guy.

We fall asleep. His body against mine in a way that suggests an accident in positioning.

We arrive at Kruger National Park, the premiere game park in South Africa. The ‘Big Five’ are there: lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, and rhino. Roughly the size of Israel, there are a few campgrounds in the middle of the wild surrounded by barbed wire.

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by W. A. Smith

Davy Calhoun slipped the driver’s seat back a notch, folded his hands in his lap and stared at the Brigham’s bright white house across the street. The hedge had grown a foot since he saw it last. How come Molly’s dad hadn’t kept it trimmed? The old man must be getting lazy, or he’s growing the hedge to keep Davy out. He lifted the pint of brandy from between his legs and took a slow pull, remembering the time he fell into the hedge—a little tight from drinking beer in the backyard with Molly and her parents and grandparents—one of the infamous Brigham Barbecues beginning around noon and continuing until everyone dropped into a lawn chair and refused to rise again. Davy had attempted the Hedge Jump on a dare from Molly’s grandfather: caught his foot on the way up and came down splayed across the prickling shrubbery like a rag doll. Molly had laughed so hard she’d had to sprint for the bathroom, beer lapping like a little ocean in her plastic cup.
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