Redux: A Literary Journal

#22: "Haints at Noon" by Marlin Barton

2012-02-27T09:11:00.000-05:00

~This piece previously appeared in New Letters (2009)

Editor's note: This story contains offensive language.

Field Notes: Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) interview, Lottie Eppes, 97. Riverfield, Ala. September 12, 1936.

These be hard times, sure ’nough, but they ain’t hard like what us had before Freedom come. I was born on the Teclaw Place, and ain’t far from it now as the crow fly. Ain’t never been far from it in all my days.

Marster Will wasn’t no good marster, but I heard tell a worse. Us didn’t starve, but us got hungry some. Three pounds a meat, a peck of meal, and potatoes every week ’bout all we got. A little fatback and syrup. Maybe a chicken on Sunday if us picked enough cotton.

Most old folks like me, they tell some, but they ain’t gon’ tell all what could be tole, just what white folks wants to hear. In these hard times now, black folks needs what they can get from white folks and be scared somebody gon’ take it away. Me, my day soon to come. I ain’t got no worry ’bout nothin’. What anybody gon’ take from me?

So I tell what some won’t.

#21: Two Poems by Erica Dawson

2012-02-20T09:54:00.000-05:00

~This poem previously appeared in Sewanee Theological Review (2010)

If I Could Write a Song

…for my grandfather, I would make it start

With Pardon me, Boy, old-fashioned southern tune

Of trains, trysts laced in satin, and the art

Of Boy, gimme a shine, New York and soon

A stop in Baltimore, a silver spoon

Set in the diner, ham and eggs, the clock-

Struck morning hour, one leftover moon.

But still the tall white pines whisper and mock

You: “Boy” in caps like “God,” so I’d rechart

The triptik, change our destination, prune

The lyrics back and make the song impart

Pardon me, Boy, is that canvas cocoon

A straightjacket? And this brick-front festoon

The state asylum in Kalamazoo? The shock?

The Haldol? Haloed, do you feel immune?

And still the tall white pines whisper and mock

Us; so, I’d make that bin our where-the-heart-

Is home, and sing there’s no such thing as loon.

Let’s make a break; and, Boy, you don’t bogart

That vodka now. In a Midwest monsoon,

Let’s go to AsylumLake like a baboon,

Beating our chest and, let’s invite the schlock,

Polack, and every other nameless goon;

Yet, still the tall white pines whisper and mock.

I, then, would end our song with this: you’re strewn

On us: Mom holds your gun but she won’t cock

And shoot. Sometimes she hears a raven croon,

And still. Your tall white pines, whisper, and mock.

*****

#20: "Other Fine Gifts" by Jeffrey N. Johnson

2012-02-13T09:30:00.000-05:00

~This piece previously appeared in The Evansville Review (2007)

Last year, despite the problems at home, I was intent on celebrating the season. I took solace in the city and all its festivity, each afternoon stealing an hour after classes to wander the downtown streets in search of the perfect gift. The lampposts trailing down Wisconsin Avenue were garnished with frozen wreaths and red ribbon, and the happy and hurried faces of shoppers blew by like snowflakes in a storm. As I joined a flow of people in front of the bookstore and pushed into the vestibule, a blast of hot air washed over me, but I was suddenly warmed on the inside by a familiar face – an old college flame twenty years removed from my life stood before me with little silver bells dangling from her ears. We stood toe-to-toe like wooden dolls and blinked at each other.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Roger Loughlin?”

But for the crow’s feet, Loren possessed the same appeal, both the sexual and the intangible, as she did in college. Her hair bounced lightly on her shoulders and she wore a long cashmere coat that somehow managed to show her figure. She looked like she would drop her bags to hug me, but held on as if she carried some fragile gift. Instead, she grabbed my arm and raised her cheek to mine in a kind of mock kiss that didn’t seem to leave either of us satisfied.

#19: "Shades" by R.T. Smith

2012-02-06T10:11:00.000-05:00

~This poem previously appeared in The Sewanee Review (2009)

Shades

When Odysseus descended to the underworld

and crossed the dark river to learn the key

to his destiny, he poured the ritual milk and honey,

the wine and barley and blood to summon the dead,

but he never expected to find his mother among

the shadows who were filled with mist and sifted

with the wind which had no source. He had thought

her alive and back in Ithaca expecting his return.

He had assumed the worst ordeals were his own.

But when he reached out, shivering as he wept,

to embrace the ghost, that wanderer found

no substance, no flesh nor blood nor bone,

and he must have felt as I did that first time home

when my mother’s mind had begun to wander

and she disremembered not only the laughter,

the lightning-struck chinaberry, the sunset

peaches and fireflies and the sharp smell

of catfish frying, but also her name and the fact

that she was sitting in her kitchen of fifty years

beside my father who stood there straining

not to wring his hands or surrender to the tears

welling around his eyes. She gathered her purse

her hat and wrap, then said, Please drive me home

before strangers take every damned thing I own.

Her eyes glaucous with terror, she was exhausted

and desperate, almost herself “an empty, flitting

shade,” as Homer says it, uncertain in her haze

whether she was moving toward or away

from what might be called the Great Dream.

When she sobbed and cried, Where is my son?

I, too, felt bewildered, and not even a seer

from the land of night and frost and smoke

could tell me what words would amount

to comfort nor which constellation to steer by,

nor where all this heart sorrow might end.

*****

#18: "The Separation of Specialist Piatrowski" by Arthur McMaster

2012-01-30T09:44:00.002-05:00

~This piece was originally published in Wisconsin Review (2009)

Jerry Piatrowski got out of bed and put on his uniform. Today was the day he’d get out. What was to stop him? A man’s enlistment is a contract with the Army, right? A legal deal with the U.S. government, for pity’s sake. Today was here. He was gone.

Jerry opened his locker and took hold of a large package on the upper shelf. Let me out, he thought. Time’s up. He had his out-processing orders to prove it. His medical records spoke for themselves.

         If there had been anyone in the barracks just then to ask him if he was sure, sure he didn’t want to re-up, he’d ask: “What do you think? Like maybe I want one more tour in the damn desert?” Jerry had had more than enough of that.
       Had there been anyone there to answer him, and there was not a soul around, he’d ask it this way: “What am I going to do, go on more patrols? Shoot more Hajjis?” He tucked his dog tags under his shirt. “All I really need.”
        The hallway was quiet.
        Specialist Piatrowski might have asked a friend to accompany him as he sought his exit to the rest of the world. Just who was or was not with him today, however, was unclear.
        The personnel building was right here. Let’s do it, he thought.

#17: "Recovery" by Kathy Fagan

2012-01-23T10:16:00.000-05:00

~This poem previously appeared in TriQuarterly and in The Charm (Zoo Press, 2002)

RECOVERY

Remember. Resurrect. A river

Taken under the rain’s

Right arm. Enter an R and everything rises,

Like cream, to the surface.

It’s the ornamental nature of the peacock

Letter. From its azure

Crest to its emerald

Throat to the Roman grandeur of its mirrored

Train—iridescence runneth over!

Red rover, red rover. And look! Regarde!

Our laureates rush over—

To write us a rhyme, a romance, or retraction,

To write an Rx for our grieving

Hearts: Turn words every morning like a bride

In your arms and repeat after me:

Resh. Ra. Roar. Rabbi. I am

Wronged. I am wrong. Dark.

Sorrow. Rare. Miracle. Adorable. Reaper. Raison

D’etre. We are

Irreparable. But what of it?

Therefore shall we labor

In the service of the R.

Therefore shall we practice

Such random acts of artifice as

The topiary, curlicue of orange

Rind, and other ethereal arrangements of the sort

Featured in Martha Stewart’s

Marathon pre-Christmas broadcast,

“An Undecorated Life is Not Worth Living.”

Pre-recorded in the recently renovated

Rooms of her rustic 18^th century Vermont,

Paris, Prague, and Ozark farmhouses,

She credits Ezra Pound and his celebrated Modern

Maxim, “Make It New,”

For her own mantra: “Make It Yourself,

Make It Pretty, and Keep the Glue-gun Loaded.”

Despair prepared for is despair

Averted. The R knows that. As do charm,

Conjury, and all rarefied matters of inconsequence

I was formerly

Forever railing against. No longer.

*****

#16: "Shelf Life of Love" by Virginia Pye

2012-01-17T09:24:00.000-05:00

~This piece originally appeared in The Potomac Review (as “Shelf Life of Happiness”; 2010)

My brother calls from his rental car on the way home from the hospital while I consider lunch meats at the Stop ‘n Shop. He rarely calls, not until recently. My mother used to call all the time. She can’t get the hang of cell phones and besides, they don’t let you use them from in there, where you need them most. The walkie talkies we gave her and Dad a year ago spoon like lovers in a box under their bed. They were supposed to give her peace of mind when she shuffled out on errands and left him alone. But now she is the one in the hospital and there’s no one at the apartment. Still, the double bed, I imagine, is neatly made, the bedspread faded but clean. She would have wanted it nice for my brother when he got back from visiting her at the end of the day. So far, though, he insists on staying with her, sleeping in a recliner chair like the ones we sat in at the end with Dad. The report from my brother is brief, inconclusive. He’ll get back to me when he has more news. We hang up without saying good bye.

My friend Sarah calls as I’m deciding between organic bagged romaine and the regular kind. She wants to know if her husband Michael ruined our visit to them. We haven’t even unpacked. When I think of ruin, he doesn’t come to mind.

“He was fine,” I say, wondering why the organic lettuce is so heavy. Then, because it’s a friend’s duty, I egg her on: “with us.”

That sets her off.

#15: "Washing the Dead" by Michelle Brafman

2012-01-09T11:09:00.001-05:00

~~This piece previously appeared in Gargoyle (2010)

No melodrama here, my grown daughter needs to know what I’ve done, and she needs to know now, today, this second, to save her from her genetically flawed impulses. Since there are no words for my shame, I dream up my biopic while I wait for her outside the Great Wolf Lodge, the premier waterpark of the Wisconsin Dells.

I map out an establishing sequence for my movie. I’ll start with a simple exterior shot of the lodge; I’ve produced enough marketing videos to exploit the way winter light casts shadows in all the right places. I’ll build a montage of weary parents and children tumbling out of minivans, their fists buried in bags of Doritos, and the eager employees in fake park ranger outfits who greet them with invitations to decorate wolf-shaped sugar cookies.

It’s cold in Wisconsin in February, so I go inside and snag an overstuffed chair next to the fireplace, to the left of the concierge. I’m too preoccupied with casting my indie film to attempt to finish my copy of The New York Times crossword puzzle I began this morning (my husband buys two papers from the pharmacy every Sunday so we don’t have to share; such small kindnesses have cemented our twenty-five year marriage.)

I decide to cast Lili Taylor as my daughter. Think Lili in her mid-twenties (Mystic Pizza or Say Anything), before the fierce optimism cloaking her vulnerability shifted from determined to desperate. Barbara Hershey will play me — not the Barbara of Beaches, soft and introverted — the Babs of Lantana, overtly serene yet damaged, her snout distorted by too much plastic surgery. Barbara grabs hold of me, and I become her ghost or the camera or something in between.

Redux on Hiatus; Open Reading Period Announced

2011-12-27T08:01:00.001-05:00

Redux will be on hiatus until January 9, celebrating the holidays and the new year. Thank you for your support, and don’t worry…there is much more to come in 2012!

Perhaps some of that new work will be yours! We will be holding an open reading period that begins on January 15, 2012, and goes through February 15, 2012. Please check the Submission Guidelines page for more details, but, basically, Redux is looking for your best stories, poems, and creative nonfiction that have been previously published in a print literary journal but that are not available elsewhere online. The piece should not be part of a book at present, though it may be in the future.

We're committed to finding new audiences for great writing, and we look forward to reading your work!

#14: Two Poems by Christina Pacosz

2011-12-19T09:37:00.000-05:00

~This poem first appeared in The Bellingham Review (1981)

Angry Lament on ‘Opening Day’, Draft Registration, July 21, 1980

“Don’t worry about it. Kill them.

God will recognize his own.”

Reportedly the response of a general

in the Christian crusades when asked

how to tell who was the enemy.

God will recognize his own.

The souls of the faithful are

imprinted on his retina

and their names lodged in his third eye

on celestial microfilm.

Be assured, judgment does not rest

with you.

Continue to use your sword

crossbow cannon

rifle M-16 nuclear warhead.

Don’t worry. Continue to use

your body. God will recognize

his own. Remember, death

is impartial. Slaughter neutral.

Only God knows

those he will enfold

in the bright light of his reward.

By many accounts heaven will not

be crowded. Only the pure

of heart may see him.

God will descend on the souls

like a buzzard. The bodies?

Bullet-torn, decapitated,

entrails spilling,

spinal cords severed -

mere flesh is not his concern.

Or yours. Don’t worry.

If you die in battle be assured.

Your death will be a casualty

for our side where

by all accounts, God

in his flak-jacket

crouches beneath the only surviving tree.

We have it on good authority

God will recognize his own.

#13: "The Rose Garden" by Paula Whyman

2011-12-12T10:24:00.002-05:00

~This piece previously appeared in North Dakota Quarterly (2004)

The travel agent assured her the room would have a view of the garden on the quiet side of the house. She envisioned a flowery bower outside and, inside, a Victorian oasis (the house was built in that era) crammed full of faux-period clutter: lamps with tasseled shades, pressed flowers labeled with their Latin names, portraits of hunting parties dressed in pinks. In her room, a four-poster bed and a claw foot tub; in the morning, the earthy odor of frying bacon would draw her out of the bed’s feathery embrace to dine among Currier and Ives, rangy ferns, cut roses.

Elizabeth rode through the patter of rain, safely dry in the back seat of the cab, and imagined her hosts. “Tim”—the only name the travel agent had provided—would be a tall yet small-boned man in his early sixties with a reddish-gray beard. Nearsighted, he would wear those magnifying half-glasses you could buy in the drug store, because he just didn’t care about fashion. His wife (Mrs. Tim?) would be a heavy-set woman as tall as her husband who spoke only to ask pointed questions. She would dislike women who wore perfume to breakfast. The wife had an eye for artful clutter, but Tim was the better cook.

The parlor would smell like cinnamon, which Elizabeth liked, or apple spice tea, which she did not. There would be two cats who kept out of sight, except to appear out of nowhere and rub suddenly across the ankles, and she would have to stop herself from shoving them gently away with her instep, instead smiling at her host, commiserating about the foibles of cats.

The saddest words, what might have been. Who wrote that? She and Cleve had always preferred to sit at their own table for breakfast. But this time was different because she was alone. This time, she hoped for the strained camaraderie of strangers at one common breakfast table, the predictable remarks about the rich food and richer coffee, the name of which would sound like an ice cream flavor, “vanilla-raspberry sumatra.” She would savor banalities like the guests’ capsule autobiographies; she’d even welcome the tentative, ill-advised stab at politics and the uncomfortable silence that followed. Faced with strangers at eight in the morning, the only common thread that they’d slept in the same house the night before—Who would choose such an arrangement?

#12: "Hot Coffee, Summer" by Christine Grillo

2011-12-05T09:52:00.000-05:00

~This piece previously appeared in The Southern Review (2005).

Saturday, and Franco woke up all vinegar. He didn’t want the kids climbing into our bed. He didn’t want the kids getting lippy. He wanted only the paper and some hot coffee, so he made the coffee, but the percolator’s dying, so the coffee was bad, like tea. It was so light, he couldn’t even put milk in it.

Already, this early, the kitchen was summer hot. I made eggs and dealt with the children. Franco drank his disappointing coffee and read the papers, the Sun and yesterday’s Il Giornale, and he huffed at their pages. He grumbled in English, and he cursed in Italian.

Joseph, my little Joseph, our little Joseph, padded over and asked him, “What’s the bad news, Daddy?”

Franco told him there were bad people doing bad things. Joseph stayed where he was, but his eyes were wider than before. Franco let out more puffs of hot air.

“Can I see the bad news?”

Franco showed him a photo from one of the front pages. I don’t remember who it was. It doesn’t matter. The bad ones are all the same.

“Is that a bad guy?” said Joseph.

Franco said yes, absolutely, yes that’s a bad guy.

Joseph smiled but he tried not to let me see it. He’s terrified, terrified, of bad guys, and so he loves them, at a distance.

With the meal on the table, we all tried to eat with nobody crying or whining or yelling. But I had to put on the air conditioners, and they were so noisy we had to talk loud, and the kids finished in three minutes and chased each other over the couch with yolk and butter and crumbs on their hands, so there was some yelling and there was some whining. And the toaster’s dying along with the perker, so the house smelled like burnt toast, and that smell sticks around for hours.

After breakfast, Franco helped me clear the table. He was heavily silent, except for when one of the kids wailed, and he said, “Madonn’.”

“You’re fun this morning,” I said, which was probably a mistake.

His words were like acid. “Thanks, Rose. That helps. Very useful comment. A thousand thanks.” He speaks in Italian when he thinks we’re fighting, because he thinks the kids won’t understand. I don’t understand everything myself, but I get the tone—he needed to be left alone.

#11: "Nomen oblitum / Forgotten Name" by Jessica Handler

2011-11-28T09:45:00.000-05:00

~This piece previously appeared in New South, 2011

My habit is to watch for small things. In gentle green grass I spy a single earth-caught feather, arced and crenellated, its knife-edge up. On inspection I see it’s a contour feather, and three inches longer than my hand. The leading edge is rippled and split from use.

A tool, lost, discarded, this single feather, ex-crow. One puzzle-piece of a carapace, densely black. Collectively: a murder of crows. Raven made the world says the Haida legend, but I am no northwest Indian, I have no claim to what some people self-consciously call “first nation.” I am southeastern, urban, and white, third-generation American. My taxonomy is built of flights not my own, but the ground on which I have been placed. In my hand now, this single feather from a crow’s right wing. My own non-hollow, flightless bones are right-dominant; do I feel the sympathetic pluck and plummet here on my own right wing?

This feather, pick it up – lice, vermin silenced by flight, return. This feather pocketed, earth-placed by a window, my own closest place to flight.

###

#10: Three Poems by Tony Barnstone

2011-11-21T10:31:00.000-05:00

~This poem previously appeared in The Northridge Review (1997).

Express Train Boogie-oogie

(Read left to right, and also verticality down indentations)

As the station recedes its lights blister

Into raindrop halfglobes

Wet tracks shuttle the eye

From path to path

Now the whole city is revealed gleaming

Fishnet of light pulling in lives

Along the avenue painted numbers

And panting engines flash into mind

Little balls of light the wind pulls

Across the glass like taffy

And now the train slides out of town

Into a flowering darkness

Here's the warehouse district and Club 333

A dark industrial geometry

Dragging trails of signs and coinage

Across billboards

Yellow fireflies packed in a jar

Burst their bulbs

Black trees and leaves in a black sea shivering

Before they drown

People make random gestures

A ragged man pasted on a bench

Where money mates with anatomy

Through the panting interiors

The windowsquares of well‑lit lives

Peer through orchids and seaweed

Greenlit pines lining an empty block

Of grey concrete parking lot

The thousand faces of a movie crowd

Burst through the borders of my body

Of triple‑X theaters

And out the red velvet EXIT

Here are plunging lovers behind half‑drawn curtains

And a woman's silent O as her mouth yawns open

A rainwet warehouse redslicked with rust

Long streets climb a hill and spill

Where metal streamlines clash and overlap

Against a canvas sky painted black

Someone looking up from his written pad

Windows like the slow frames of a film

Through my reflected body

Shining like the tines of a fork

As carload after carload of light

Flickers and is eaten whole

#9: "Driving in Snow" by Joseph M. Schuster

2011-11-14T09:43:00.000-05:00

~This piece previously appeared in New Virginia Review (1993)

When Byrne's brother arrives, Byrne doesn't recognize him. At first, watching the passengers emerge from the gate, he wonders if Thomas missed the bus, or decided not to get on board. But not even Thomas is that irresponsible. Byrne must have overlooked him. Thomas is, after all, not a large man, and the station is in turmoil. An early spring blizzard has moved in, making buses late. Byrne has been waiting for an hour and a half in the midst of the lines of angry passengers, the masses of people planted on upturned luggage because there aren't enough benches.

He is shoving toward the ticket counter to ask if a second bus is due from St. Louis when he spots Thomas, standing a few feet inside the gate. He was one of the first passengers off the bus, Byrne realizes, but it's no wonder he didn't recognize him. In his uniform, Thomas looks like a different person, with the starched creases in his trousers and the black necktie just visible at the collar of his coat. Byrne is amazed at the transformation. His brother seems innocent and young, like someone playing soldier. It's the short hair, he realizes. The long hair Thomas had before he enlisted hid his face, as did the blond wisps of the beard he tried to grow. Now that face seems exposed, naked. Byrne is reminded of the schoolboy in the pictures his mother had on her bureau at the nursing home. Thomas in the second and third grades; Thomas before he turned bad.

Byrne raises his hand to wave but sees that his brother isn't alone. A woman cradling an infant is talking to him, her mouth close to Thomas's ear. Byrne lets his hand fall. Thomas hasn't said anything about a woman, and the circumstance of the visit -- their mother's funeral -- is hardly social.

#8: "Autumn Harvest" by Jane Delury

2011-11-07T11:46:00.000-05:00

~This piece previously appeared in StoryQuarterly (2001)

Jacques crouches in his father’s garden, coaxing leeks from the hard November ground. Six rows of cabbages away, the old man is digging up bouquets of mâche with a grit-encrusted knife. Jacques grabs a shoot of leaves and pulls out a stem, slick with saliva-like bubbles. The leek slaps into the basket and his father looks over, his glasses steamed by plant breath into two opaque circles.

“Getting them all? And the roots?”

“Fine, Father,” Jacques says, “I’m doing just fine.”

He waits for the slice of the knife to resume, and then clutches another cold jumble of leaves. The earth buckles and splits, belching a sweet, rotten smell. With the leek in one hand, he uses the other to pull up the socks that have bunched around his ankles, exposing his heels to the bite of the air. A hollow eye stares up at him from the plank where his loafers balance, precious and inappropriate against the warped wood. “For your city shoes,” his father said when he handed him the plank at the gate. Jacques wonders again what is really being protected— his shoes from the soil or the soil from his shoes.

The old man has finished the last row of mâche. His gray gardening coat ripples over the emptied soil as he heads toward the main path. Reaching down for the last two leeks, Jacques notices his father’s misbuttoned collar, which rises high on one side and lies flat on the other. The collar is like the napkin the old man could not find the previous morning—sitting under his fork—or the letter he set out to mail twice or the reading glasses he misplaced on the top of his head. Jacques’s mistake was to point out the glasses. At the time, his father said nothing, simply lowering them to his eyes and flattening the newspaper against the table. But that afternoon, he called Alexis and Emmanuel to the garden and they came running by Jacques, who was on his knees, mending a hole in the chicken wire.

“Don’t yank, son. Pull.”

#7: A Poem by Brandel France de Bravo

2011-10-31T09:38:00.000-04:00

~~This poem previously appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review (2011)

Grammar School

America

the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of the twenty-four

frames per second as bottomless, open as the holes in our desks

where the ink bottles weren’t, like the cloakroom without cloaks—just

parkas and yellow raincoats. Hands perpetually raised, the smell

of mimeographs redolent as our mothers’ perfume, violet fingers

quivering in the air. God shed your grace on me, which would be

the lavatory key, shackled to a wood brick bigger than a 7 year-old’s

hand, thighs, buttocks clenched against shame. And naps

at our amber waving desks on pillows of crossed arms, my soul

to keep, as the radiators, skeletal beneath the windows, sang

their hiss and clang lullaby. Waking, we tied on our thinking caps,

index fingers ready to march once more across the Weekly Reader,

to bushwhack through the dense green words,

fearful of ambush.

America

the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of us a majestic

purple note, and each of the twenty-four frames a forspacious story,

until the projector, its young eaten, stutters to white, until Mrs. Boston,

roaming the aisles, would single out the one not seated

to teach us proper speech. “Where’s Antony?” she’d ask, or “Where’s

Jerome?” and Denise, Deborah and “T,” falling like straight men,

hang men every time would point to the student clapping erasers

or standing startled at the pencil sharpener, and shout, proud

to know the answer to something, “There he go!” And Mrs. Boston,

hands on hips, would turn to us, smirking slightly and using

the double negative I found so thrilling—my white mother would have

slapped me for it—to correct: “I don’t see him going nowhere.

There he is,” she scolded. I knew the difference between the two verbs

but the lesson came too late for me, going always a substitute

for being in a life spent leaving: this classroom, this brotherhood,

this sea to shining, and Antony still

not nowhere.

*****

#6: "Black Hole" by Walter Cummins

2011-10-24T08:52:00.001-04:00

~~This piece previously appeared in Outerbridge (1993)

The cloud cover thickened just as the cable car began its ascent, lifting off from the wooden boarding shed and skimming the tall spruces on the mountainside. Paul knew they had lost the sun for the day; only a small circle of blue sky remained far in the distance. When they reached the peak, even the nearby ranges would be swallowed in grey.

"We won't see a goddamn thing." Paul kicked a boot at the side of the car.

"Stop pouting," Leslie told him.

"I came here for mountains."

Their eyes locked, and Paul quivered with resentment. An hour before, maids clattering outside their hotel room, they had thrashed in lovemaking, not caring that their cries could be heard in the hallway. Now he found her lips thin and mean as she clenched her jaw. We're only good in the dark, he wanted to tell her but instead turned away from her face.

Below the dangling car, the village and its lake shrank into postcard perspective. But the plastic windows of the car were yellowed and scratched, blurring his view.

Perhaps most people had known clouds would ruin the midday brightness. Only a few others were in the car with them, pressed against the sides and peering outward: a very old man in hiking breeches with a gnarled walking stick; a mother and young daughter with the same plump sullen face, side by side but saying nothing to each other; a middle‑aged couple in shorts and thick boots over heavy woolen socks, their legs tanned and muscled.

When the car reached the first of the towering pylons that braced the cable, it rumbled over the metal base and pitched sideways. Paul panicked: the wires were snapping, they would plummet. He gripped a handrail and then‑‑an instant later‑‑felt foolish, wondering if Leslie had noticed. She stared out at the treetops.

"The top of the world," he scoffed.

Leslie turned to meet his gaze. "I'm as disappointed as you are."

#5: "Tourist Season at Auschwitz" by Mark Lewandowski

2011-10-17T09:37:00.000-04:00

~~This piece previously appeared in The Gettysburg Review (1999)

On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute.

Pete Davies, “All Played Out”

At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen. You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes. The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis. The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.

Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond. Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water. Take a stick. Dip it into the water and movie it in circles. Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface. This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.

A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss. I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków. This was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months. American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles. The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to Oświęcim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.

“By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz. After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau. The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors. Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates. You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves. Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers. They have not been reconstructed. They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz. Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity? Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them. They knew their sin. You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz. Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”

#4: "Little Sinners" by Thomas E. Kennedy

2011-10-11T09:56:00.000-04:00

~~This piece previously appeared in American Fiction 1 (1990)

My ninth summer, in 1952, I ran with a kid named Billy Reichert, a classmate from The Christian Brothers Boys School. We were thieves. We used foul language. We smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes purchased with stolen quarters. We pored over the dirty pictures on a pack of Tijuana playing cards Billy had secreted in his basement. It was a lovely summer.

I loved stealing. You had to be quick and brave. I loved that feeling in my stomach just before I made my move. I glanced at whatever it was--a Milky Way bar, a cap pistol, a comic book--walked past, scanned the shop in front of me, turned, scanned behind, and if the coast was clear, zip! I moved, shoved it in my pocket, under my shirt, down my pants. Then I hung around a while as a precaution, but also as part of the fun: that incredible sense of power it gave me to stay there, moving slowly amongst the enemy, the loot on my person, the danger, the triumph, the sheer belly-tingling risk! I asked the shop clerk, the guy with the pencil moustache and under-slung jaw at Gerstie's, say, the price of some impossibly expensive item, HO gauge electric trains or a glittering package of imported hand-painted lead soldiers in red coats, looked wistful, wandered out with my head down. I understood from overhearing my father, who was a legal counselor for the State of New York, that the law said you could not be arrested for shoplifting until you were actually out the door, so I was prepared to put the booty back on the shelf again at the least suspicious glance. But none ever came. I was too quick. Me and Billy could lift just about anything – coins out of the cigar box on the brick and plank newspaper stand in front of the Roosevelt Avenue cigar shop, comic books out of Gerstenharber's, cupcakes and Mission sodas from the A&P or Frisch's Market, toys from the glass shelves of Kresge's or Woolworth's, and assorted junk, mostly mysterious small automotive gadgets, out of Sears & Roebuck's which, for some reason, we called Searsie's. If there wasn't anything in particular we desired, we would lift any old thing, just for the joy of it.

Billy was a nice-looking good-natured boy, blond and tan and blue-eyed with a big white smile and easy laugh. My feeling for him was a little like love. We were together all the time that summer, morning to night. We rose early in the mornings to go out prowling in the mild air, breathing the aroma of honeysuckle and cut grass. Usually I was up first and called for him because of his sister.

#3: Four Poems by Hailey Leithauser

2011-10-03T10:59:00.005-04:00

Vexillology

~~this poem previously appeared in West Branch (2009)

Overnight, someone has discovered suffering.

Someone has putt-putted over an ocean of misery,

and planted a flag.

You can hear the cloth snapping in the morning

air that philanders the hyacinth

that sits by the door. You can almost see it

from the balcony where you recline,

tasting a glass of very cold

tomato juice, or a minted tea.

Listen...snap, snap, snap...

and then a lull, and then a moment,

and ... snap, snap...

the decorum of a hand

brushing crumbs from clean linen.

If asked, you would guess stripes

or a Scandinavian Cross,

a field of quince yellow

and aquamarine,

an eagle in the center, or a falcon

circled in stars,

clutching an emblem of laughable knives.

#2: "Clockwise" by Dana Cann

2011-09-26T10:56:00.002-04:00

~This piece previously appeared in The Florida Review (2006)

On the night they died, the Wynn family, each in his or her bed on the second floor of their house on Maiden Lane, dreamed of the children—of Tina Wynn, the girl, and Brandon Wynn, the boy—flying, clockwise, through the rooms and hallways that formed a loop on the first floor. It was the same loop the children had run when they were small, chasing one another or being chased by their father or their mother or, on occasion, both. But tonight they did so in their dreams, and they did so in the air, without touching the ground. And all the while the gas from the cracked furnace seeped up the stairwells and through the floorboards and vents, which brought the heat from the furnace’s flame to the rest of the house.

C-O, the father, Gordon Wynn, would have thought, had he been awake rather than asleep, had CO been the sort of gas one could smell or taste. But he knew, of course, that CO was not that sort of gas. He knew, in fact, if he had been conscious, that he would have become sleepy—so sleepy that he would have become unconscious, and that would have been his only clue something was wrong. And who didn’t get sleepy in the middle of the night, when all was dark and quiet?

CO. Such an innocent formula. Drop an O off a substance as harmless as carbon dioxide, and it’s suddenly poison? But, sure enough, one by one, each member of the Wynn family ceased to breathe.

But before they did, they dreamed.

Looking Good!

2011-09-22T15:00:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Bill Skillern for our new masthead!

Subscription Information & Open Submissions in October

2011-09-19T07:25:00.002-04:00

We will post a new piece next week. Please bear with us as we get acclimated to running a journal; we’ll be posting weekly very soon. So much great work out there…!

Some news:

~ Redux will hold an open submission period in late October. Please check back for more details.

~ You may receive a free email subscription to Redux by entering your information in the box in the right column

~ You may subscribe to Redux on Kindle for a small fee. The link for more information about that option is here.

#1: "Ostriches" by Susan Tekulve

2011-09-12T18:43:00.002-04:00

~~this piece previously appeared in New Letters (2006)

The dark hours. Dreaming, Sadie stands on her front porch in a hurricane, her bra flying out of her hands, rising into the dark arms of hemlock that shred its lace and batting. She wakes, reaches into her cotton night gown, touches the cyst curled above the jagged scar across her chest. In the mirror at the foot of her bed, her face is haloed by fine, white hair, her skin clear as lilies from all the radiation treatments. Outside the window, telephone wires twist into the hemlock, and the blue mountain ridge hulks against the red-streaked November sky. She glances back to the telephone on the bed stand, thinking, I cannot tell this over the phone.

Down in the kitchen, her husband, Dean, sleeps on the picnic bench beside the table, one frost bitten hand resting across his chest. The stove’s eyes are covered with dirty pots and pans, the counters lined with jars of apple butter, squares of brown sugar fudge, a whole chess pie he made for her yesterday. Above the china-filled hutch, his rifle rests. His long, silver hair unwashed, his square chin unshaved, he looks like one of the old-time mountain men who sometimes wander through the cemetery beside the house, cursing at the cats napping on the tombstones. When Dean wakes, he’ll take the gun into the wooded ridges above their house to hunt wild boar, elk, ram, stock the freezer full of wild game. After months spent in still hospital waiting rooms, he needs this walking. He’ll wander for hours on his land, up leaf-covered ridges that kettle their red brick house, his flintlock rifle on his back.

Sadie pulls Dean’s red and black flannel hunting jacket over her nightgown, slips his boots over two pairs of wool socks. When the screen door creaks, Dean startles, grabs the edge of the table, pulls himself up.

“Sis?”

“I’ve got to go tell her,” she says.

Redux: Work Worth a Second Run

2011-09-06T00:02:00.003-04:00

Hello—

Welcome to Redux, the online literary journal devoted to finding lost gems of print age contemporary literature and bringing them to the internet. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, but that was before the internet came along. Surely in the vast expanse of whatever-it-is (a cloud?) that is the internet, Redux can claim a tiny corner to feature previously published literary work, stories and poems that are too fabulous to be locked away in the dungeon of page 64 in a lovely—but now forgotten—issue of a literary journal tucked away in the dark stacks of a university library.

Each week, we’ll feature one story or a selection of poems or an essay that has been previously published in print only, work that is not contained in a book or anthology. The author will offer a few thoughts about why he/she has selected this work to share with the world. And you, dear reader, are asked only to enjoy.

You may sign up for a free subscription above, in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Be assured that your name and email address will not be used for anything other than notification that Redux has been updated. We’ll be up and running with a great story next week, and as we work through our growing pains, we’ll be posting something every other week, with an eye to moving the journal to weekly publications soon.

You can learn more about the Editorial Board here.

If you’re a writer who would like us to consider your work for inclusion on Redux, please carefully consult the submission guidelines found here. We will be open for submissions in the near future.

Thank you, and we’re looking forward to doing our small part to help great work reach new readers!

~~Leslie Pietrzyk, Editor

Launch Date

2011-08-16T21:52:00.000-04:00

Get ready...Redux will be launching on Tuesday, September 6, 2011!