... in our front door, waiting for the cat to come home for dinner, or working on the puzzle we'd bought, of Klimt's Flower Garden , when suddenly I'd hear the snap of the shutter and the motor of the eject. More often than not, at least at the beginning, the sounds came from nearby: there she'd...

...Amy Fleury © 2012 by Virginia Tech 2012 Amy Fleury The Fort When we’d grown bored of the birth-slick piglets squirming in the farrowing house’s false heat, we left to climb the gate and gallop through pasture, coats hung open, our hands October raw. Crossing...

... every move. You had no hammer, but we didn’t need one. I was forever polishing the same grain of salt. In ten years we’d received bonnets. A team of horses for you and a rifle for me, after canning the summer’s peaches. One day we woke to an unfamiliar backdrop...

..., as long as the chrome sluices kept bringing water down from the high Sierra and the fiberglass stars hung in place beneath the great dome of the antique mall. So we built a raft. We’d watched how to do it on television, when we were children, using tarps...

... feet of spruce balanced above us, looked down. Soon it would crash and I’d start limbing—the branches exploding like crystal in the surly air. We’d pile a couple of stacks and take a break to pull our sweat shirts off, soaked through...

... mother that she called out on impulse. The thing made a half turn and faded gently backward through the wall. Later the hands, and the following weekend Rita, our au pair, also awakened by hands. It all began in your absence. Doors would slam upstairs and we’d turn up...

... perfect, pale chest. Suddenly she’d have an urgent need for thumbtacks, or lighter fluid. I had heard somewhere about an animal with two pairs of eyelids, cats maybe, or lizards. I was always reminded of that watching her with him. We’d stand at the counter and it was like her eyes...

... the end of the Cold War, that it would mean an aggressive expansion of it, so we’d analyzed that. Not just us. Some other people, some other comrades actually in the Com- munist Party as well. We understood what was happening with Amer- ican imperialism and therefore when 9/11 happened, we...

...Nathan Viste-Ross © 2006 the minnesota review 2006 the minnesota review Nathan Viste-Ross Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College Brochures called Career Impactwere stacked on the skid. We'd mailed thousands of the glossy...

... would steadily gift me joints, but not so much so that he’d think me a potential John. We were roughly the same age, frequented some of the same mega-clubs back home, and reminisced about the different name-brand hits of ecstasy from the nineties. We’d discuss...

.... She could have died. My father answered, It’s over now. She said, I thought if you quit drinking we’d have peace. I forgot your family, too. When my uncle came for his gun, she met him in the street. I saw her hands shove the gun in his open window, point...

... mean. We’d spent weeks traveling across the sea without ever seeing the sun is another way of putting it. It’s like the deeper you get into it, the less you want to know about it. But I couldn’t help myself. A whale had washed up in our backyard, and though I...

... or orbital tool. On a full moon he’d remove his gem eyes, shine them like space marbles. We’d make a night of that. Mechanical Dad was always reserved, until you wheeled him out front by the hedges and neighbors. Then he’d really get going about Carver. Dad had an aptitude for dirt, the levels...

...-rust she was vigilant to Indian-rope-burn raw. Her spit-soaked bullet-poke scrutinized our whole future like a comet or a shining rocket. We’d have to learn better how to look our own selves over. Get right up close in the mirror, she warned us. She polished us like silver...

... the mobile, hanging the yellow curtains with circus animals on them we'd picked out three and a half months before, when it was safe to tell people we were pregnant. In the month that followed I'd go back to those curtains, to how much Wendy loves the circus though according to her sketch, which...

... search happened right after Shelley started in Operation Skunk. We went way out, on a strip of highway we’d never gone to in the daytime, and even in the chilly October night air I could smell little rotting corpses all around us. We walked slow, sweeping our flashlights back and forth...

..., they'd choose the name without strange consonants, the person who looked and sounded more relatable to them. To succeed, I would have to be more; harder work and better work—not good work—was the rod by which we'd be measured. Hence why, over the course of the last year, I ran Grady's eighties-era...

... of dust? Um, well, no— Though we’d made it in the park, in some out-of-bounds shadows, and would find, Later that evening, a peppering of aphids in your hair. We stared At the Hogarth. The reward of cruelty. Nero on the dissection table...

...Gary Geddes © 2007 the minnesota review 2007 15 Gary Geddes Ladies & Escorts I walked off a job in Castlegar for safety reasons. Dismantling steel is what we’d been doing, temporary structures...

...Jeffrey H. MacLachlan © 2013 Jeffrey H. MacLachlan 2013 Jeffrey H. MacLachlan The Vanishing Child I’m leading you to her. Pay attention to what I’m saying. Doesn’t the night sky look like a giant one-way mirror? As a child, we’d go to the planetarium for school trips and create water...