Short, Fast, and Deadly

Short, Fast, and Deadly
Issue Eleven
Edited by Joseph A. W. Quintela
21 February 2010

Featuring:
Judi Brannan Armbruster
Thomas Cochran
Elissa Gordon
Bernard Henrie
Ted Jean

Copyright © 2010 by Individual Authors
All Rights Reserved

Inkwell

One watercolor afternoon we rented a boat after looking at the seals and sharing caramel corn.
 
America was everywhere. We were young and full as library books. The sunlight was on her hair like hummingbirds as we rowed into the July heat and drifted into shallow water. Everyone wanted to marry her. We bumped against the mud bank still kissing.
 
It was as though we were writing the last line of a love poem.

 
by Bernard Henrie of Los Angeles

What I Learned Back When Produce Had a Season

Joy in small gestures,
my mother clapped her hands in delight
at asparagus-
presented by my father
every day it was in season,
like bouquets.

by Elissa Gordon of Elizabeth

Camouflage

She went to church that hot summer Sunday. He wouldn't. They quarreled.  She was difficult. A motorized chair was her command post. He always acquiesced. Indifference or PTSD?  She returned, trailer empty. Gone for good? His duffel in the corner said no. Three days later children on Post Office Hill found the body, hunting knife, blood soaked camos. He had watched her slow return from church with suicide eyes.

by Judi Brannan Armbruster of Happy Camp

The Passage of Time

History rides
across the plains,

urging itself

with an ever-
changing hat.

by Thomas Cochran of West Fork

Metamorphosis

Denny was up to twenty tractors when his wife died of throat cancer. Caterpillar tractors: big and yellow, planted alongside the road to the house, around the barn, up the fence line across from the vineyard of the yuppie neighbor, and to the five acre wood lot at the top of the property. You could sit in the cab of the enormous D9 above the barn and see the whole fucking Willamette Valley. When she died, he quit.

 
by Ted Jean of Milwaukie