Issue One – June 2001

War and Flowers

By Alie Wiegersma Smaalders

1933: The year Adolf Hitler is given emergency powers.

1933 it says on a photograph in my red leather-bound album. I lived in a small town in Fryslan, a northern Dutch province. For myself and for nineteen other nine-year-old girls it was the year that the town’s photographer came to snap a picture of our singing class,

Last Look

By Aviva Kana

The old bench is abandoned now, its rotting wood gives no indication of the child that once played upon it or the tears that once ran down it to the earth. The rusty metal flakes off at the touch. Yet it is to this bench that I always return, and even though each year I pull farther away from my childhood, I hold desperately onto the bench and all that it entails

In the Arms of the Ocean

By Leta Currie Marshall

A mild insanity has taken hold of me lately: an obsession with beaches. Warm, sunny beaches. Warm, salty oceans. I fantasize about snorkeling over a reef confettied with bright tropical fish, or walking barefoot in the sand somewhere, anywhere, my pant legs rolled up, friendly wavelets fizzing around my ankles. I stand in front of the tropical fish tanks at a big

Fishing Log

By Georgie Muska

A last look round the house – picked up the jar of flowers Celia had brought: deep red sweet williams and blue verbena. Down at the dock Lark and Corrie came with Peri, Sarah’s friend who was coming up to Ketchikan with us. Corrie brought dinner for our first night out, made by a group of friends: cold chicken, bread and salad. Kai, Vilina and David came down, with

A New Life

By Karen Fisher

The psychic was an ugly man, aging, in gold jewelry. I was unsettled by the darkness of his lashes, the fullness of his lips. When he laughed, he threw his head back like a woman.

“What about her?” My boyfriend asked. We were at a table of friends, lunching at a restaurant on the pier. The air moist and heavy, smelling of tarred decking and fried fish.