December '04  

news: Hobart #4 available now; 2004 Pushcart nominations

Guest Edited by...
by Ryan Boudinot

Plane Crash Stories
by Stephen Elliott

Apparition
by Stephany Aulenback

EP No. 5
by Calvin Liu

Prequel
by Lee Klein

Evenfall and the Residents Return from the Casino
by Matthew Simmons

  Apparition

         by Stephany Aulenback
            (an excerpt from Hobart #4)

For a long time the man had admired the children’s mother. For as long as that, he had known there was no way to her for him. The man’s parents had moved to the town from away. Although he had been an adolescent when they’d moved there, the townspeople did not consider him a local person. The townspeople tolerated people from away, they were even friendly to them, but they were wary of them. When the children’s mother was young she had been warned not to get too friendly with boys like him. As it turned out, a local boy would leave her, and with two children, just the same. The locals told the children’s mother she should not risk being left by any man from anywhere again.

There was no sense, then, in the man wanting to be close to the children’s mother but he did. She was not a beautiful woman but something about her was. There were no straight lines about her. The features of her face were crooked. Her eyes were large, one slightly larger than the other, and she would fix them on the man’s, quietly, whenever they happened to meet.

The man was an ordinary man. All straight lines, or almost all.