The Goats

October 2023 | fiction, Pushcart nominee

Even before the car turned into their driveway, Wilma and Edgar could see they had visitors.

            “Is that what I think it is?” Edgar said to his wife of forty years.

            “I believe so,” she answered.

            “Oh, well.” He peered out at two small goats. They had taken over the small porch—one  nibbled at the leg of Wilma’s rocker, the other rubbed its backside against a porch post.

            “That post is loose,” Edgar said.

            “Aren’t you going to park?” Wilma asked.

            “Reckon so.” Edgar removed his foot from the brake. He stopped shy of the carport, not wanting to lose sight of the goats.

            Locked in her own stupor, Wilma was thinking of all the times she’d asked Edgar to screen in the porch. Her concern had been mosquitos that kept her from enjoying late afternoons outside.

She looked at the largest of the goats—the one with a clump of hair hanging from its chin. An image of Edgar in his fifties leapt from her memory—he’d sworn he’d never shave the goatee. She smiled, thinking of the day he had.

            She wondered, aloud, “Where did they come from.”

            “Probably the goat farm down the road,” Edgar said.

            “They travel that far?”
“Oh, yes, farther.” Edgar wanted Wilma to stop talking. They would have to go in to bed soon; it was already past eight. He could feel her restlessness.

            “We’ll have to go in,” she said.

            “Yes.”

            As the couple sat in silence, the goats began prancing around. The older goat came to the very edge of the porch and looked squarely into Edgar’s eyes. The animal let out a loud, “Blleeeeaaahhh.”

            Wilma flinched.

            “They’re testing us,” Edgar said.

            “Well, I don’t like it.”

            “Now, now.” Edgar patted her left knee. Her dress had ridden up her leg. He felt the warmth of her skin beneath his hand.

            She said nothing. He could feel the tension running through her.

            He hoped she wasn’t recalling all his foibles. That’s what she did now. He was too distant, too independent; then other times he was too nice, too cloying. He knew she was waiting for him to get out of the car and chase the goats away. Then she could go straight to her room, get out of her travel clothes, and lie down on her bed, alone.

            The goats romped some more; one hopped onto Wilma’s rocker and fell back as the chair rocked suddenly.

            This made Edgar laugh. “Look at them. I wish I still had that kind of energy.”

            “Blah,” his wife said.

            There was something about the way Wilma said, “Blah.” Edgar could feel his hand, still on his wife’s knee. A flash of old desire nudged him, touched him deep—much as if a sexy woman had bumped against him, and he was forced to pay attention.

Edgar couldn’t understand it, but he felt young again, ready. He looked into his wife’s eyes and squeezed her knee.

             “You old goat,” she replied.

Juyanne James

Juyanne James is the author of The Persimmon Trail and Other Stories (Chin Music Press, 2015) and Table Scraps and Other Essays (Resource Publishers, 2019). Her stories and essays have been published in journals such as The Louisville Review, Bayou Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Thrice, Ponder Review, and Xavier Review, and included in the anthologies New Stories from the South: 2009 (Algonquin) and Something in the Water: 20 Louisiana Stories (Portals Press, 2011). Her essay “Table Scraps” was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2014. She lives and teaches in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Mission Report: El Eclipse de la Grande

October 2023 | fiction

La Manzanilla, Jalisco, Mexico, Thursday, July 11, 1991

10:50 am

I am writing in a thatched hut a half mile down the beach from the village. The surf crashes on the shore.

Supplies

2 jugs agua pura

2 cameras

Tortillas

1 can chicken meat which tastes like dog food

1 can Vienna sausage which IS dog food

2 granola bars

1 can Herdez salsa

 

We have traveled here from Lubbock to witness the greatest full eclipse in decades, using an Eclipse Monitoring Station fashioned from a Johnnie Walker box with a hole cut in it. The hole is covered with foil from a cigarette pack, with a smaller hole poked via a safety pin in the foil. It’s a Camera Obscura, a pinhole camera. Jimbo read about this design someplace. He is a friend from high school and has joined as a Mission Specialist.  He wears a straw cowboy hat and a red Speedo. He has a portly frame.

 

11:00 am

We have not pinpointed what time El Eclipse will begin, having heard many different accounts. Mission Specialist Jimbo was supposed to be on this. One local said it would not occur here in this part of Mexico at all. We discounted his opinion immediately.

The man told us this last night as we sat at a table on the dirt street in front of a little store lit by a bare bulb. A large man with a cleaver, shirt open, was chopping pork on a board, then frying it in a pan over a propane flame.

“El carne?”  I said.

“Si, es porco. Taquitos.”

“Dos, por favor,” I said.

He fried the chopped pork and scooped it onto two steamed tortillas.

“Frijoles?” I asked.

He handed me a Tupperware bowl with cold beans floating in it. The taquitos were mas fina. I considered my potential disablement from the mission after consuming the frijoles.

12:45 pm

A hen with six chicks has disappeared from around the shack behind us. El Eclipse underway.

12:55 pm

Eating Herdez salsa out of a can. Smoking a cigarette, peering into Camera Obscura. The earth-rending blackness we expected has not yet materialized.

1:18pm

Sort of like a cloudy day at the beach.

1:30pm

The sky seems to be lightening up. A rooster crows behind us. I believe El Eclipse is over. Jimbo reports that the whole universe has now changed and that his fillings hurt while the spectacle was underway.

A long moment of silence, as the surf crashes.

“Mine, too.” I replied.

 Conclusions

The next night, drinking pulque at Hermana Hortensia in Mexico City, Jimbo and I found an English-language newspaper, showing the path of El Eclipse.

We were several hundred miles off course, far from the dark zone, figuring that the moon was really big and would black out the whole country. As the mildly hallucinogenic pulque kicked in, we closed the mission, agreeing we are clueless specks of sand on the beach.

 

David Fowler

David Fowler has lived in New York, San Francisco, and on a ranch near Penelope, TX. He writes from journals kept during his travels and lives in Jackson, MS. This is his first published fiction.

A Romance to Night

October 2023 | poetry

In the crisp death of summer, a cat

falls from a broken branch.

The moon sings, amused by paw

half-crushed under the stares of a passing car.

 

Vacant children drive purposely

through the blaze-maze of gilded cul-de-sacs

scattered with condoms and crushed fireball nips,

numb to clouds adulting overhead.

 

Outside the bar a couple try to kiss for the first time.

 

On the fire escape, some woman hums anxiously sweeping.

Waiting, I stare into my scotch

as the glow from an RCA television

and smells of ammonia suffocate the pub.

 

Above the bar, the moon reflects a rooftop coop.

The pigeon sits upright in its wired grave, cooing

as a priest doubles over.

 

Ed Gaudet

Ed Gaudet is a writer who lives in Hanover, Massachusetts, where he is a cybersecurity software entrepreneur in healthcare. He has written for Forbes Magazine. His journey with poetry began at an early age and grew during university where he studied under poet Ruth Lepson and was greatly influenced by Robert Creeley. While attending Bentley University, he was the Editor-in-Chief of its literary magazine, Piecework. In 1999, Ed was awarded the grand prize for his poem, “Sitting Shiva,” which appeared in Into the Sun. His work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Panoply, Clade Song, and Book of Matches, Lit.

Stanley Horowitz

October 2023 | visual art

Covid Winter

Covid Winter

Illuminated Thoughts

Illuminated Thoughts

 

Stanley Horowitz

Stanley Horowitz’s work was exhibited in the 2008 Heckscher Museum Biennial show on Long Island. During the past two years, he was a featured photographer for The Wayfarer, and covers have been published for Rattle, Buddhist Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Kestrel, Off the Coast, Stand Magazine, and Burningword Literary Journal.

Girl #4

October 2023 | poetry

Back there, someone crowned me.

Yes, me! — Where do you think

I got these carnations?

 

I’d like to unclaim candidacy,

but there’s already a Klimtish woman

threading my hands with rings while

someone calls for shin ribbons.

A man cradling five pincushions

coaxes my sclerae to bloom.

 

I enter on a bridge of hands.

Dozens, it seems, press my midriff,

and thumb my hair.

 

What’s this? Only halfway

to the stage, and they’re dragging

dimes from my curls. Too much

tugging, clinking,

I feel myself kick —

 

When I find my way home,

you’ll have many questions, like:

Out so late? Tea, my love?

Darling, where are your shoes?

 

I’ll promise to explain later,

complain of a headache —

could be the cold, or the hour,

or maybe the wind,

 

rattling the coin slot

wedged between my eyes.

 

Christianne Goodwin

Christianne’s chapbook “Oracle Smoke Machine”, a collaboration with painter Stephen Proski, is forthcoming with Staircase Books (Cambridge, MA). Her work has been published by Rust + Moth, The Lakeshore Review, Fahmidan Journal, and Panel Magazine. She is a graduate of the Boston University MFA program, the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow.