Posted on July 2, 2010 - by Derek Alger

According to Whom?

It’s a simple phrase, an elementary question, but one which probably should be considered more frequently by people in general, and journalists, in particular, both print and broadcast, and that is “According to whom?”

In an age where passions, and resulting generalizations run high, outlandish pronouncements have a way of masquerading as truth simply because of the lost art of attribution. And thus, we come back to “According to whom?”

As an “accidental” reporter in what seems like a former lifetime, I learned early on that I needed two sources, solid sources, on a story, and most of the time I wanted more, to ensure I was correct. I worked under a number of demanding editors, and despite some unpleasant experiences, I actually learned from all of them. The one thing all of them insisted on was attribution, if I stated something in an article, I’d better be able to back it up and answer the editor if he screamed, “According to whom?”

Sitting in my living room these days, if I relied solely on cable news, and the respective pundits on various networks, I would think the country was either in imminent danger of a Marxist government takeover or there was about to be an impending charge from a right wing militia armed with buckshot and tea. Of course, neither is true, but once again it’s time to check for attribution, who’s saying what, and where is that person coming from, and to what are they affiliated?

A major shift occurred in American journalism with the Watergate scandal and the groundbreaking investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. What many a young journalist failed to notice, however, was these two guys at the Washington Post were professionals and despite all the long hours, and exhausting work to track down and verify facts, Woodward and Bernstein were dependent on sources.

That is brought home very clearly in the movie All the President’s Men, based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book of the same name, when Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, race trying to nail down sources for a story and are trying to figure out whether the potential source has given them a “non-denial denial” which would mean a confirmation.

Perhaps I’m fortunate I never took a journalism course, with no disrespect to any of the fine journalism teachers across the country, but over the years I’ve run into more “advocacy” journalists than I care to remember. While I was always nervous about getting the story right, so many so-called “serious” journalists were off and running to change the world, to make a difference, but the difference was always in line with their own belief system or ideological bent and never had much to do with reality, or God forbid, facts or verification of facts.

Of course, on the other extreme, I once worked for a hard-nosed publisher who worshipped money and self-interest, so many times he would start with a headline and hope the editorial pieces could be made to fit. Sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn’t, but I was always thorough, and through that process, I learned how articles could be easily slanted through omission of salient, yet perhaps inconvenient facts. Overall the publisher respected my integrity, if not always the results of my investigations, but if worse came to worst, at times he would seek to counter my story with an accurate but misleading headline, usually in blaring red, in the hopes it would have more affect or at least counter the first couple paragraphs.

Another friend of mine, a tenacious little Irish guy whose father and uncles worked on the docks in On The Waterfront days, and who had a relative from Hell’s Kitchen who was reportedly one of the last to be executed in the State of New York in the electric chair for raising a gun and shooting another fellow point blank in the head over a trivial difference of opinion, which no one quite remembered, made his living as a hard core investigative journalist, covering organized crime and government corruption. He was big on being able to answer “According to whom?” on everything he reported, as he needed to be since many of his articles eventually culminated in indictments and subsequent judicial proceedings, more often leading to plea deals rather than trials, but still, a lot was at stake.

As an exercise, he and I used to go through articles in local newspapers, reading sentences and too often, laughing in unison, as we exclaimed, “According to whom?” because attribution was missing and the respective reporter had made a divine leap in order to present conjecture or opinion as irrefutable fact. It’s an interesting exercise, one that can be enlightening at times, depressing at others, but also, one can feel comfortable when finding a responsible reporter who does indeed present a balanced story, which is not to be mistaken with an editorial piece, which by its nature automatically answers the question, “According to whom?”

As I was writing this, The Rolling Stone article about General Stan McChrystal, commander of all U.S and NATO forces in Afghanistan, hit, with the inappropriate quotes by his aides about President Barack Obama and the war effort there. I think everyone, or almost everyone with even a minor understanding of the workings of inside politics, recognized the next inevitable step after publication of such an article would be the departure of McChrystal from command, either by resignation or firing.

Yes, there’s attribution in the Rolling Stone article, and the attribution is most likely valid, but once again the journalist was involved in the process of shaping the article, deciding which quotes to use and which to ignore. So, if I had to guess, the journalist in this particular case started out with a premise, and the premise may very well have been legitimate, but the journalist must have known what consequences his article would have for General McChrystal, especially with the proliferation of electronic media in this day and age, where everything is magnified, with snippets almost instantaneously becoming foregone conclusions.

So, here we are, a Rolling Stone article has disrupted the war effort in Afghanistan in a major way, and maybe that’s good, but it was caused by the choices of a journalist in selecting what to present, though one also has to question the arrogance or naivete of General McChrystal in allowing such unfettered access to his inner circle. I’m not sure such an article in the same venue would have exploded the same way, with the same results, 20 years ago, but that was 20 years ago, and today, more so than ever, a rumor or a fact quickly translates and spreads, all the while gathering momentum, as the illusion more and more becomes a solid conclusion, and thus, the reality.

Most news by its very nature is transient, a blip, if that, in average people’s lives and attention span, forgotten almost as soon as it appears. Those in respective articles are generally quickly forgotten, as readers move on with their respective lives. Even those stories with second or third day leads, or ongoing successive articles covering a major trial or a natural disaster, such as the BP oil spill or Hurricane Katrina, eventually fade from front and center, as they are slowly or immediately replaced by the next sensational event.

I agreed with Geraldo Rivera the other night when I caught him on a cable news segment “passionately” questioning why the author of The Rolling Stone article would consciously write such an article, an article which to some, myself included, did nothing to further the greater good. When Geraldo was told Rolling Stone ran the quotes by McChrystal before the story ran, and McChyrstal reportedly didn’t have a problem or objection, one can only speculate that perhaps the general, in his inexperience with the media, falsely believed he was sufficiently covered and protected because almost everything in the article was attributed to unnamed sources, such as “a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations” or “According to forces familiar with the meeting,” or “says a member of the general’s team.” There certainly were an awful lot of “sources familiar with situations and meetings” in the article.

I’m not sure many of us would make out well, or be seen in a favorable light, if comments about us appeared in an article, according to “a classmate who asked not to be named.” How does one respond to “a classmate who asked not to be named” and wasn’t? The incident might be true, but one is certainly left wondering about the context, or the overall purpose of writing about McChrystal being passed out in a shower after drinking too much beer while a cadet at West Point. And once again, according to “a classmate who asked not to be named.”

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes anonymous sources are essential, but one hopes such sources are used responsibly and to highlight a major aspect of a story that those in power don’t want to come to light, for whatever reason. Otherwise, you can imagine what power a journalist has to paint an individual in any negative view he or she desires, by simply relying on unnamed sources or those who wish not to be identified.

In the end, I’m not sure what was accomplished by the article, except to create a mini-drama for a couple days over the showdown between General McChrystal and President Obama, one in which I think the outcome was never in much doubt. In fact, the Rolling Stone article basically dares Obama to take on McChrystal. Others should read the Rolling Stone, if they want, though it’s really not essential, the story has already moved into the blur of the past. General McChrystal is gone and now the narrative will center around his replacement, General David Petraeus, architect of the successful surge in Iraq, tapped by Obama to command the armed forces in Afghanistan.

What stood out for me in the article were the following two sentences: “But, as he moved on through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills the had learned as a troubleshooting kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far — especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th.”

Where did that come from I wondered. Analysis, speculation, McChrystal explaining and stating that to the journalist, or more commentary from unnamed aides and sources close to situations and meetings, and possibly, the inner working of McChrystal’s mind? To me, those sentences in the Rolling Stone article, surrounded by all the other details and conclusions, clearly were a challenge, a double dare, if you will, getting right in President Obama’s face and declaring, on the part of General McChrystal, “I know best, better than ambassadors, foreign policy advisors, Senators John McCain and John Kerry, and even you, Mr. President, so take your best shot, if you are willing and able.” As it turned out, President Obama was more than willing and able, and General McChyrstal did indeed get tossed out of Afghanistan, and in short order.

In the final analysis, the previous ramblings in this particular column are about an article by a journalist, who had access to General McChrystal and his team of close advisors at Kitty O’Shea’s bar in Paris, where the drinks were flowing, and this one said this, and another said that, and outside sources and such were called to weigh in on aspects of the article, and now you have my take on things, which, obviously is not fact, but at least is certainly according to me.

Posted on July 1, 2010 - by Ryan Gleason

Brenda Eisenberg

Brenda Eisenberg’s “High Stakes Stuff” is one of the featured macro-fiction pieces for this July issue of Pif (http://www.pifmagazine.com/2010/07/high-stakes/).  The work is only a portion of her novel in development, Prayer for a Safe Journey.  Our Pif excerpt is the story of a petty theft spurring an impromptu police interrogation of a gang of children; this is all set in the midst of the political strife and racial tensions of South African apartheid.  Brenda’s own personal experiences as a young woman living in South Africa during apartheid inform the racial, religious, and overall emotional tensions of her project.  I maintained an email correspondence with Brenda in order to get a better sense of the historical realities that framed the writing of her novel.  Issues I encouraged her to discuss included some personal reflection on South Africa, perceptions of Judaism in South Africa (a central theme of the novel), and apartheid era struggles with such widespread diversity of people and languages.  The following is an interview between the two of us; her answers reveal the complexity in understanding one’s personal and cultural history in an ever-shifting world.

RG: So, what is the current status of the novel?

BE: I started writing this novel at the end of 2006 and I’m currently working on a fourth draft. The feedback on my third draft pointed to some fairly substantial gaps in the flow of the narrative, so this 4^th draft is about filling those gaps and rebalancing the novel as a whole.

RG: How would you characterize your work’s overall setting?

BE: The novel is set in 1980s South Africa, the last decade of apartheid. Resistance to apartheid was particularly fierce at this time and there were many violent uprisings in the townships and demonstrations amongst the student population. Conscription to the army was compulsory for all white men of school-leaving age and the South African Defence Force had a reputation for brutal treatment of conscripts in training (which then transferred into brutal military action). The only way to delay conscription was to keep on studying in higher education, which is what my protagonist does.

RG: What motivated you to tell this story?

BE: This feels like an important story to write.  For one thing, it offers a fresh angle on the apartheid story, through the eyes of a young orthodox Jew. But also, it looks at powerlessness in the face of a system you feel you can’t change and how young people turn to extreme solutions when they experience that impotence. Extreme religious practices are particularly attractive to a certain type of young person, and my protagonist, Eli, is someone who craves a sense of belonging and needs to be insulated from some of the more terrifying aspects of life.

RG: Would you elaborate on the development of your main character, Eli?

BE: At the start of the novel Eli Adler is living in dread of his army call-up. His friend Bernie has died during basic training and to make matters worse, Eli’s twin brother Gabriel (always his closest companion) has turned away from him.

Eli is a law student at Wits University in Johannesburg, and orthodox Jews are active on campus, trying to encourage assimilated students back into the fold.  Eli is initially skeptical but gradually, he’s drawn in.  The sense of belonging and the reassuringly clear parameters of Jewish Law go some way to filling the gap left by Bernie’s death and Gabriel’s departure.

Eli is now eager to prove his commitment to Judaism and rebuild a sense of family, so he rushes into marriage with the young, also newly-orthodox Ilana. But her family is secular and Eli becomes frustrated with what he sees as their complacency.

By now Eli has taken up a job as an articled clerk (which means he is still temporarily exempt from the army), but his growing obsession with intricate religious laws puts him on a collision course with others, both at work and at home.

RG: How does this particular excerpt fit in with the rest of the novel?

This excerpt occurs two-thirds of the way through the novel. Eli has volunteered to spend a week in the remote semi-desert area called the Karoo, as part of a project that renovates neglected Jewish cemeteries. It’s a mitzvah, a good deed, to undertake such projects. While there, he witnesses the local cops meting out rough justice against a group of township kids who are accused of stealing chocolate from the local shop. This episode throws into relief Eli’s helplessness when faced with the big moral challenges of apartheid South Africa.

RG: Your excerpt takes place in the Karoo.  Can you give our readers a sense of that environment?

BE: The Karoo is an extraordinary region of South Africa. It’s a vast semi-desert area in the interior of the country with a beautiful, desolate landscape. The settlements are far apart, and tiny. In the first half of the 20^th century these small towns had a Jewish presence through peddlers and shopkeepers who served the local farmers. So you’ll find vestiges of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in the most far-flung of areas. It’s hard to imagine how tough it would’ve been for immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to adapt to this landscape. My own grandparents made that journey and my father grew up in a Karoo town called Aberdeen (a Scottish missionary would’ve had something to do with that name). I’ve always found these remnants of Jewish communities very evocative.

The Karoo

RG: What do you remember life to be like in South Africa during the novel’s time period?

BE: The novel is set in the 1980s, when resistance to apartheid was really gathering momentum. In 1985 the government declared a State of Emergency – thousands of people were detained without trial, political meetings were banned and curfews were imposed in the townships. At the time I lived in a student residence at Wits University (a prominent mixed-race university, and highly politicised) and I can remember arriving at breakfast to discover that fellow-students had been taken away by police during the night. Some of them had to face solitary confinement or torture, and they had no legal recourse.

While all of this was happening in the townships, life in the white suburbs was going on pretty much as normal and because the press coverage was so flimsy many people were largely unaware of the ferocity of the resistance – and the ferocity of the state response to it. As a student at Wits University, Eli is well aware of what’s going on, but his response to these circumstances is to take refuge in the rules of orthodoxy. During the course of the novel he clashes with others who deplore what they consider to be his head-in-the-sand approach.

RG: Your excerpt is very interested in relating language divides between people.  There seems to be a sort of binary between those who understand and those who don’t, or the words shared between people, but kept from others.  Would you elaborate?

BE: As you’d imagine, language was highly political in SA during the apartheid years. The two official languages were English and Afrikaans, but Afrikaans was the language of the ruling party. In this piece the cops don’t speak English, partly because their grasp of English is poor, but it’s also a way of saying, we are in charge and we are not going to make the effort to speak your language. Today there are eleven official languages in SA (nine African languages, plus English and Afrikaans)!

RG: You’ve made some conscious decisions about what words to translate from Afrikaans to English in your piece, and which words to not.  Can you talk about the decision making behind your translations?

BE: In making decisions about translations, I was aiming for a balance: I wanted to leave some things untranslated, so that the reader experiences a sense of the characters’ frustration of being on the outside, but not so much so that it would make the piece unsatisfying to read.

There are some words in this piece that have entered English usage in SA, either because they describe something culturally specific (eg sjambok is a type of whip) or because they are evocative (eg boendoe, pronounced ‘boondoo’, is a local version of ‘boondocks’).

RG: I’m eager to get a better sense of what brought you to writing.  Will you detail that process?

BE: I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of six, but by my mid-thirties I was in a demanding full-time job, and I realised that if I was serious about writing I would have to make a change, so I quit my job and began working from home as a freelance business consultant. I used to commute for two hours a day and I told myself that I would spend at least that amount of daily time on writing. Things haven’t turned out quite as neatly as that, but I still try to maintain a regular writing routine, alongside my freelance work.

In 2006 I won an Asham Award for a short story entitled Under the Black Hat, which is published as part of a Bloomsbury anthology (Is This What You Want, Ed Kate Pullinger, Bloomsbury, 2006).  That was a really positive moment: firstly, it gave me much-needed encouragement; secondly, it was the first piece of writing I’d done on a Jewish theme and it triggered the idea for this novel. Before then it had never occurred to me that this could be a compelling subject for a novel.

RG: How would you characterize your own experiences growing up within Jewish South Africa?

BE: I was brought up within the orthodox Jewish community of SA, although my family were what we would call ‘traditional’ rather than strictly orthodox. We had a strong sense of cultural identification, we went to synagogue regularly and observed the Jewish festivals but unlike Eli, we weren’t strictly observant. In my teens, and again at university, I had periods where I immersed myself in Judaism and thought about taking a religious path – in fact, several of my close friends did exactly that. There’s much in Judaism that I find profound but ultimately the world of orthodoxy felt too circumscribed for me.

RG: Can you sketch out the historical context of the Jewish community in South Africa?

BE: The Jewish community in South Africa is made up mainly of Lithuanian Jews who went over during the late 19^th and early 20th centuries to escape persecution by the Tsars.  In many cases they arrived with nothing and the only opportunities open to them were those that the indigenous whites were not keen to take up. This is why they landed up in these godforsaken places. But on the whole, Jews in South Africa enjoyed the privileges associated with being white under apartheid. They enjoyed freedom to practice their religion and ultimately the community became very prosperous.

RG: What is the relationship like between the Afrikaners, the white majority, and Jews?

BE: The Afrikaners are the descendants of the Dutch settlers who arrived in the 17^th Century, and they regard themselves as the true pioneers of SA.  In the early 20^th century the Afrikaners became marginalised under British colonial rule but in 1948 the Afrikaner National Party came to power and the country came under their control.

There’s a really strange anomaly in the relationship between Afrikaners and Jews.

There was plenty of anti-Semitism amongst the Afrikaners and substantial support for the Nazis during World War Two. But the Afrikaner community had also developed this notion of being the Chosen People, as part of their national mythology. (They were deeply religious through the Dutch Reformed Church).  So there were many Afrikaners who identified with the ‘Israelites’ and who put Jews on a pedestal. As a Jew, one could never quite tell whether one would get a positive or negative reaction from an Afrikaner, and there are entertaining scenes in this novel where Eli encounters both types.

RG: Historically, was there a resistance to apartheid from South African Jews?

BE: The Jewish community had a paradoxical role in relation to the struggle against

apartheid. On the one hand, Jewish religious leaders were reluctant to openly criticise

the government because they feared a backlash. This was in contrast to other religious

groups, who were much more vocal. On the other hand a disproportionately high

number of white anti-apartheid activists were Jewish. These included figures such as

Joe Slovo, Albie Sachs, Helen Suzman and so on. Incidentally, these high profile

figures definitely served to fuel feelings of anti-semitism amongst the Afrikaners.

RG: I’m very curious to hear your take on the transformations within South Africa over the last thirty years.  What have become some of the central issues in contemporary South Africa?

BE: South Africa now is in many ways unrecognisable from the country I grew up in. There’s a new generation of young black people who have themselves never experienced apartheid – it’s something they read about in history books. To me and other people of my generation, that’s extraordinary.

There were times when we couldn’t imagine that the transition out of apartheid could be peaceful. I was sitting in a conference in Johannesburg when Prime Minister FW de Klerk unexpectedly announced that the ANC was unbanned and Mandela would be released. There were many political activists in this auditorium, including people who had spent long periods incarcerated on Robben Island, and I will never forget the stunned expressions on their faces at that historic moment.

We were blessed at having leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu, who were able steer the country through a peaceful transition. Which is not to say, of course, that the country isn’t struggling with the legacy of apartheid. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done in education, health care, housing, transport and so on.

Perhaps the most pressing problem in SA is the high crime rate and the extreme violence of this crime. It doesn’t happen along racial lines – crime is targeted towards black and white alike. It’s endemic. I think it’s a legacy of the violence that people had to endure under apartheid (of which this excerpt shows a fairly small-scale example). And we’re dealing with a generation of people who missed out on education, and who can’t see a way to improve their lives other than through crime.

Right now SA represents an extraordinary mix of warmth and energy and forgiveness on the one hand, and endemic violence and corruption on the other. One has to hope that the former will win out. As the most economically developed country in Africa, SA’s success could of course drive political and economic improvements further up the continent.

RG: Any thoughts on the ongoing South African hosted World Cup?

BE: I won’t be in South Africa for the World Cup but everyone there says that it’s a wonderfully positive experience. It seems to have reignited a warmth and sense of unity in the country. That’s heartening, because visitor numbers were looking disappointing in the run-up and there were real question marks over organisation and safety.

RG: Finally, you are currently living in London.  What brought you to England and how would you describe living there?

BE: I’ve been living in London since 1992.  I came at the age of twenty-five for a gap year, but I immediately felt at home in London. Maybe it’s to do with my grandparents’ European heritage, or the colonial history of SA, but so much about England felt familiar and warm, and London is a great place to live. It has tremendous diversity and coming from SA the general atmosphere of tolerance is refreshing.

The diversity and quality of cultural activity here is dazzling. I can walk into an art gallery and see a famous masterpiece or I can turn up at the Royal Academy of Music and listen to world class musicians. All for free!  One has to have grown up on the tip of Africa, or at any rate, outside Europe, to appreciate fully what a privilege that is.

Posted on July 1, 2010 - by Evan Retzer

Radio, Active Decay

New Orleans is a city of dead lights.  The glow emanates from keyhole windows in the skulls of shotgun houses, hangs dreary over the streets in the oppressive musk of evening.

Sara coughs, like static on radio.

Inside the houses, she says, no one is there.

Not really.

The cherries of our cigarettes pulse like exit signs outside the front door, drive away flies.  Inside, through the glass panes in the painted wood, TV mellows the porch, a sick manifestation of white light.  It’s playing, between commercials for auto insurance and breakfast cereals, a reality show filmed at some drug rehab facility.  Sara gazes at it uncomfortably then looks away.

Please, she says, her eyes assuming the very real ambiance of a pleading child.  I really need this.

Inside the apartment, past the built-in bookshelves overflowing with paperbacks of Burroughs and Leary, scattered pens, translations of the Pali Canon, absinthe glasses still ringed with sick green, a hookah, a postal scale, past the old records labeled Millions of Dead Cops falling against a Mayan calendar round, our child sleeps on a small mattress on the floor – eyes twitching in delta sleep under the humming fluorescent of a fish tank, right hand drifting near her face with a wet thumb stuck out.

I don’t want to do it.  I hate the interstate.  And Janie’s asleep.

The shallow discoloration under Sara’s eyes is consumed in street shadows as her cigarette burns lower.  For a second I imagine her skin has become yellow, jaundiced the way the face of my dead aunt looked before the coroners zipped closed the body bag – giving the lost child look again, coupled with a mischievous, hinting smile.

B will sell me a gram for 50.  You know that normally costs a bill.

Yeah, I know what it costs.  But why can’t we just stay at home, turn down the lights… be ordinary people.

I’ll share it with you, she entreaties.  We could be home in 40 minutes.

God, I feel so disconnected.  I just want you; you know that?  I don’t want to drive anywhere.

Once we get home, she says, I’ll give you anything you want.

The truck takes 5 minutes to start without killing, shuddering its low, hacking growl then coming to life, and our child wakes drowsy from a dead sleep.  We creep past the cemetery’s chain-link fence; shadows slant across the windshield like criminals, the shine of headlights on mausoleums.

When you died, whispers Sara, I didn’t know what I’d do.

The street signs have been twisted into the wrong directions – bent from some collision – but I know the way.

The doctors told me you would never be able to remember anything again.  Never be able to remember my name -

I had lost oxygen flow to my brain for seven minutes, I tell her.  My knuckles tighten on the wheel.

Until they restarted your heart.  With the norepinephrine shot, or whatever it was called.  You had started to turn yellow.

Like my aunt.

And purple.  You looked so different.  It was as if you weren’t even there anymore -

I break at the stop sign on Fern Street for a passing car that has no right to share our world.

And so you can’t really blame me for not telling you I was using.  I was so scared you wouldn’t come back a second time …

Our child stirs in her seat and asks for juice.  I cast a free hand around the cab feeling for it, and say

Do you know what I saw?  When I died?  It was like everything started to fall away, like pixels on a screen – one at a time.  I was receding from the world, the sweat tinged mattress and off-white walls.  Then I felt hands grabbing me, and looked down -

The paramedics.

Maybe.  But the way I saw it, then, the hands belonged to a crowd of midgets, lifting me over their heads, and carrying me out into the street, down the sidewalk and down inside of this gaping, rusted drainage pipe.  As I’m being pushed inside the pipe, I realize there’s shit everywhere; it’s a sewer – the sewer is a microcosm of this life, this earth – I can smell it close around me; I’m choking on it, struck by waves of nausea.  And, down at the end of the shit pipe, in the distance, I can clearly see a pure white light.  Radiant, intense.  I am getting close to it.  The light could have made me, made everything, disappear.  I was close to reaching it, I think, when they gave me the shot.

In front of us the on-ramp to interstate I-10 is ominous, calling.  The radio is broken and is vacillating between classic rock and talk radio through epileptic fits of static.

There was blood everywhere, Sara whispers.

The interstate crescendos to a built up overpass; we reach its peak, my engine guttural, struggling, and clear the slope.  Below, we can see the lights of homes and businesses in New Orleans East, spreading out before us in a sprawl of happenstance – still patchy and half deserted from the Hurricane that wiped clear and rotted our memories – heartbreaking lights, jaundiced yellow, encapsulated in the bleak body bag of night.  I think of cops waiting to snare us, a fatal accident on the concrete edge of the elevated highway.

In the seat between us, Janie opens her eyes, and asks

Daddy, where are we going?

I don’t know.

I just need one last fix, admits Sara.  I’m going to quit, like you did four years ago, when you went to that rehab.

I notice, again, the shadows under her eyes.  It’s like the eyes are dying fluorescents, flickering, moments from burning their filaments and going out.

This time things are really, really going to be alright, she says.  I know it -

Lunch on the Grass

by Richard Holinger on July 1, 2010

Marisa Silver

by Derek Alger on July 1, 2010

The Whole Thing

by CE Chaffin on July 1, 2010

Writer with Lap Dog

by Anna Monardo on July 1, 2010

Prayer to La Virgen

by CE Chaffin on July 1, 2010

High Stakes Stuff

by Brenda Eisenberg on July 1, 2010

2666

by Ryan Gleason on July 1, 2010