Issue 26

Escape

By ELLYN GAYDOS

I live on a wooded road posted with NO TRESPASSING PROPERTY OF GEORGE FUDGE signs. In addition to being a large landowner, George Fudge rents out dumpsters, and is rumored to be an ex-con and confirmed to be a minister. When the season is right, he plows snow. He’s plowed my driveway more than once for free. I am surrounded by good intentions. On the wall of the post office there is a note that says, I am an honest girl, written by a customer who took a card costing $2.99 and left $3. The town maintains a free rack of clothing outside the dollar store, kids’ jumpers and XL T-shirts fluttering brightly.

I work on a small vegetable farm carved out of hayfields owned by the local high school and woods owned by the local commune. The other young farmers and I grow food for a hundred families that come each week to get shares of vegetables, which begin in spring as ephemeral greens and end in winter as sacks of beets and potatoes.

Home from work with a heavy trash bag of compost for my pigs, I find the escaped animals locked in the chicken coop. They got out in the unwatchful summer afternoon, their snouts bending up the bottom of the fence to roam undeterred past illegible PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. They were escaping their squalid pen out of pure misery, I think. I had been watching them get shocked trying to push through, seeming genuinely angry, for the past few days, putting off moving the fence out of laziness or a desire to escape the drudgery of what I’d taken on.

Escape
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The Struldbruggs

By R. ZAMORA LINMARK

No I do not want everlasting life
to be condemned to forever here
on this wasted earth no merci messieurs
unlike the Struldbruggs hailed all the way
from the island-nation of Luggnagg
discovered at the end of Book Three
of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

The Struldbruggs
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Why I Cannot Celebrate the Ruling Still to Come (II)

By NED BALBO

Because I still remember my mother’s scar,
six inches long, an inch wide, sunken gash
below her waist, forever unexplained.
Because the scar looked rushed, a knife’s quick work
closed with no time to lose. Because, watching
her dress, I felt both love and mystery, 
questions evaded, others left unasked.

Why I Cannot Celebrate the Ruling Still to Come (II)
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Mainland Regional High School, 1987

By JENNIFER FRANKLIN 

I’ve never admitted how it altered me. 

I try not to think about it—the spring 
the junior dropped out of school 
after wearing a wire so the police could cuff 
Mr. Cawley—led him out of the high school 
down the long beige corridor of B-Hall 
past the AP History class where I sat 
with my textbook open to some European War, 
trying not to think about my confusion 
when I stood, the May before, in Mr. Cawley’s classroom, 
as he held my book report on In Search of History.  

Mainland Regional High School, 1987
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