An hour after SmokeLong Quarterly’s issue 16 came out, while I was still reading, sitting wide-eyed and unblinking in front of the computer screen, my hands shading the monitor from the westerly sun, I knew I wanted to review the issue on my website. I’d launched guest editor Alicia Gifford’s profile for the Writer Profile Project that same day, and I couldn’t wait to see how her aesthetic had influenced the publication. Plus, I saw writing from the ever-amazing Myfanwy Collins, the lyrical Ann Walters, and Beth sock-it-to-you Thomas. And wait! Nancy Zafris?! As in the author of the The Metal Shredders? Yup! The one and only. She is also the editor for The Kenyon Review, by the way.

My mind revved and I started making notes and then I got interrupted and interrupted and interrupted and finally, I sat down with my schedule (the big desk kind, like you’d find on a construction site; mine is from Caterpillar, the maker of big yellow tractors) to reschedule, and that’s when I realized I didn’t have enough time to do a review justice.

I started trying to rearrange things, and I got frantic and frustrated, but then this red-tailed hawk busted through my window (I even have a duct-taped hole to prove it… okay, fine, that was from a skill saw attached to an extension cord falling off the roof and swinging…) and pecked me on the shoulder and said: Darby Larson.

You’re Darby Larson? I said.

It pecked me again and left a huge fricking gouge in my cheek.

Fine, I get, I said. I’ll ask him if he wants to do the review.

And so I did. And he said yes.

At the time, I had no idea I’d be joining the SmokeLong staff a mere month later, and no one but Darby and I knew he was working on this review. When he finished it at the end of April, I oohed and aahed over it for a week before realizing: Crap. Is this a conflict of interest? After much debate among various people, the decision was made: the review would run. I, for one, couldn’t be happier. Darby spent over a month reading and rereading every single piece in this issue, and his honesty and insight, will, I hope, be much appreciated.

But enough. I’ll turn it over to the man himself. Right after I introduce him with a bio…

***

Darby Larson has had fiction published online at Mcsweeney’s Internet Tendency, Opium Magazine, Eclectica, Monkeybicycle, 3AM Magazine, Barrelhouse Magazine, Eyeshot, Dicey Brown, Hobart, In Posse Review, and other journals. In print, he has work in Opium Magazine, Bullfight Review, .ISM Quarterly, and a story forthcoming in Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD). He lives in Northern California with his wife Sarah, and works full time as an Integrated Circuit Engineer. Visit him on MySpace, and read his interview at the Writer Profile Project.

***

SmokeLong Quarterly Issue 16: A Review by Darby Larson

When Kelly asked if I’d be interested in reviewing SLQ #16 for her dot com, I thought without hesitation and said (typed), “Sure!” Then later I said (thought) to myself, “Uh oh. I’ve never written a real review before. Do I know how?” Then I (said) to myself, “Something smells like burnt coffee.”

Issue #16’s guest editor is Alicia Gifford, Night Train’s fiction editor and a talented writer. Accolades need to also go to the rest of the masthead; Editors: Randall Brown, Matt Bell, Katrina Denza, Thomas White, mind-blowing cover artist Marty Ison, and keeping the whole thing going for 16 issues with a refreshing consistency that’s rare in online publishing, founding editor, Dave Clapper.

With that, I’ll go ahead and put on my ‘reviewer’ hat and open up this pack of cigarettes.

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“Heaven by the Highwayside” by Mike Amato
‘Heaven by the Highwayside’ by Mike Amato is an incredible opener for the issue and displays some remarkably solid writing. So remarkable I was surprised I’d never heard of Mike Amato before. Googling him, I found that he does get around.

The atmosphere in ‘Heaven by the Highwayside’ (This title, by the way, floors me. Amato has a wonderful sense for the way words sound.) was so vivid, I can’t imagine I’ll be able to shake it any time soon. The idea that raw experience can be heavenly is such a cool thing to think about, especially when the experience borders on being painful: The golden glow of the sun, even filtered through their eyelids, baked their pupils.

The dust whipped past and Buck quickly snatched up some diesel fumes with his nostrils before they got away. This so perfectly encapsulates the idea of craving the pure, experiential sensation of something.

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“There Swells and Jets a Heart” by Rusty Barnes
Before diving in and reading ‘There Swells and Jets a Heart’ by Rusty Barnes, I couldn’t help notice four paragraphs of almost identical length, all beginning with the word ‘Lindon’, as if it were a four stanzaed poem, and it might be a kind of poem if the title is a clue. From Barnes’s Interview we learn that There swells and jets a heart is a line from Whitman’s ‘I Sing the Body Electric.’

Reading Barnes and Whitman next to each other, they do seem to share the same narrator—the viewer of a man and a woman. But while Whitman’s narrator is busy persuading us that our accumulated human anatomy is in fact a soul, Barnes assumes Whitman’s truth and unapologetically infuses souls into his two viewees as well as into the viewer himself. And when the viewer possesses a soul, the result is envy. Or maybe not envy. Some kind of longing slash envy slash quasi-jealousy. I don’t know.

This piece is filled with wonderful bits of writing like while great tears hiccupped from him and his soft tap on your rattly screen door and my favorite, Lindon the boy you wrote of to your best friend Jackie your heart probably pounding like mine as you poured your soul out with grape ink on a yellow page, because my old creative writing teacher always told us never to use the word ’soul’ in fiction.

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“Miss Hempstead’s Brother” by Myfanwy Collins
Myfanwy Collins’s ‘Miss Hempstead’s Brother’ is one of those stories that feels like any amount of commenting on it could destroy its beauty. I keep trying to dive in deeper and all I come up with is a more intense sense of mystery that mirrors the mystery of death. The grandfather telling the story by the lake, coyotes, northern lights, a moose chewing cud, a boy wearing clogs holding onto the back of a moving school bus, these things all sort of come at you simultaneously, inexplicably.

Once again, the editors have a knack for picking stories with writing that makes you go, How the fuck did she write that? hunky brother… foggy waters… Pooey Louis and that was all in one sentence! …thinking of the way the sky is wreathed in green and pink up there, up north? I keep saying the phrase, howling high to the leader’s low moan over and over in my head.

The POV is worth mentioning. There’s a sense that the narrator is actually Miss Hempstead referring to herself in 3rd person, that the distancing is a means of coping. Even referring to her brother as ‘Miss Hempstead’s brother,’ revealing neither her brother’s nor her own first name, feels like a kind of layered coping mechanism. Her feelings about the death of her brother are so hidden below the surface that the sympathy we feel for her just hits us that much harder.

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“This is What You Left Behind” by Tod Goldberg
‘This Is What You Left Behind’ by Tod Goldberg punches you with all its force in the first reading. It was late and I was getting tired when I was about to read this and I almost went to bed, but I decided to read the first paragraph and that was all it took for me to get sucked into reading the whole thing right then.

The blunt, successive declarations of This is… holds you the way uncompromising truth holds you. This is what it is. This is what’s happening. These are the things. And so the reader sees this with clarity while our narrator/protagonist remains blind.

The lengthy and loaded sentences are such a great device for holding a reader, for building a kind of suspense…

I work from home now, which is silly because if there was ever a time I should have been working from home, it was when you were at home, too, but realizations like that never seem to happen when you’re in the middle of the kind of strife that leads to realizations, because… and that’s not even half of the entire sentence!

###
“Ten Very Short Stories” by John Leary
Reading ‘Ten Very Short Stories’ by John Leary was like looking at pictures of war through absurd, kaleidoscopic lenses encased in sunglasses that are five times bigger than your head.

What really helps pull these ten separate short stories together is the eleventh story, which was smartly excluded from the title. A kind of meta-fictional epilogue, giving us a glimpse into the struggle of trying to write something funny in a very unfunny world. It made this reviewer go back and read each story again. And each turns out to be nearly as sobering as they are intoxicating.

Representative sentence: A police car arrives and your mother blows it up with a grenade launcher.

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“Photographer and Model” by Stefani Nellen
‘Photographer and Model’ by Stefani Nellen. Imagine a photographer taking pictures of a model. Any emotional connection between them must adhere to the boundaries inherent in the titles ‘Photographer’ and ‘Model.’ The former may only snatch visual moments of time with a camera while the latter attempts to influence those moments by posing. Imagine these coterminous restraints, no touching, no nudity, only whatever a camera can capture, applied to two people in love. Imagine they’ve been pushing against this Photographer/Model restraint, trying to breech it for decades. Imagine how close they could possibly get to each other without breeching it. This is how I like to think of ‘Photographer and Model’ by Stefani Nellen.

There is some superbly tight writing here. Every syllable seems to matter.

It’s how we met. He needed a model. I needed the money. We both found love, decades of it.

Click.

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“On Mondays, Francesca Takes the Stairs” by Cami Park
‘On Mondays, Francesca Takes the Stairs’ by Cami Park, is only one sentence long, but what a sentence! Park manages to reverse the poles of the old dueling metaphors: a head-in-the-clouds imagination vs. a grounded reality, allowing the flightiness to occur at ground-level, and as our protagonist gains altitude, the more grounded in reality we begin to feel, until we open the door at the top of the stairs and succumb completely.

Since any representative sentence would be the entire story, I’ll just pick one word: meringue.

How many writers are willing to put so much care into a single sentence? It is quintessentially flash.

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“Seven in the Morning” by Max Ruback
The first word in Max Ruback’s ‘Seven in the Morning’ is Sergeant. Pretty soon, the phrase He only senses something wrong will appear. Then later, A car bomb at dusk in Iraq. The telling of the event of the car bomb is embedded magnificently in a story that is essentially about the aftermath of that bomb.

In the naming of the dog, ‘Sergeant’, in the ambiguity in the sentence He only senses something wrong, which in this story refers to the dog as he looks at his owner’s prosthetic legs, but also feels like a kind of echo of a thought just before an actual car bomb explodes, the story manages to give a strong sense of the event within the telling of its own aftermath! The dog then scoots nicely into the role of metaphor for the military our hero used to be a part of, a military that has rejected him for someone who is more able.

Okay, that was a lot of over-analyzing to basically say, this story is about what war and prosthesis do to familial relationships. It is heartbreaking. The ending possesses a strength that is unanalyzable.

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“Baby in a Jar” by Tom Saunders
There’s a sense that ‘Baby in a Jar’ by Tom Saunders is not so much telling (showing?) a story as it is acknowledging a story, or that stories derived from reality often have characters we don’t think about, who have their own stories, and that all our stories are intertwined. From Sneddon’s (who’s name I thought was interesting because I’d never heard it before, so I wiki’d it and discovered something called Sneddon Syndrome, characterized by a symptom of hypertension, which may or may not have anything to do with Saunders’s story, but there it is) inexplicable utterance of his uncle’s baby in a jar, who’s own story must be rather odd, to the stories of Sneddon’s sister who doesn’t care anymore, to the mystery in the stories of the girls they remember from childhood. Throw in a television as a perceptive filter and you have a story bursting with an intriguing complexity.

I’ve read ‘Baby in a Jar’ about five times now and continue to discover odd little things. Sneddon’s personality seems to be full of opposite extremes. One witness at the inquest said Sneddon was brave, another said he was stupid. Hopeful, is how I prefer to think of him. And later… Sneddon was dishonest by profession… yet, He never bothered to tell lies.

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“The Color of Moths” by Holly Selph
‘The Color of Moths’ by Holly Selph uses color in fascinating ways. I’m still trying to get my head around it all, and may just use this review as a process for doing so. There’s a sense that Selph is saying that a color means more when given a context, or becomes a metaphor. When such a primary color (red, for example) can mean so many different things, (Glass Heart, Vixen, Cherry) then we no longer have the ability to discriminate based on simply the brilliancy of color with no context, in which case a butterfly would be more significant than a moth, and instead discriminate on the meaning of that color based on a particular context, in which case, the color of a moth contends.

What struck me as interesting about this piece was the slow progression of darkness to lightness, and simultaneously, familiarity to unfamiliarity, with respect to setting. We begin in our protagonist’s most familiar environment, her own bathroom, move to the sort of familiar (dark?) bar where she has obviously been before, then move to the gas station (I’m imagining an outside area lit fluorescently at night time), which she may or may not have been to before, then finally, the store inside the gas station (The store is too bright. I have to squint.). And is this representative of the forward progression of a moth as it seeks lightness from darkness, moth to a flame, etc.?

The last thing I want to mention has to do with the appearances of the colors red and yellow near the end of the story, He has a red bandana tied around his head, and his yellow Ford Focus is running beside him. The colors of fire are everywhere, dangerously close to spilt gasoline. That her toenails are painted red somehow makes it more plausible that her feet may actually catch on fire.

###

“The List” by Paul Silverman
‘The List’ by Paul Silverman. The desire to be famous, to be acknowledged by people, by an audience he’ll never connect with drives our hero maddeningly from newsstand to newsstand to verify his potential listhood, all wonderfully juxtaposed with the disconnection of his closest friends, no phone messages, no email. Only spam, junk mail… false connections. He’s just barely hanging on to the fringes of a normal social life, caring deeply about his spam as if they were sincerely written to him, caring deeply about Gwendolyn, his broken dog, Bent with sore bones.

I’d like to riff on the last line a little. The reference to Armenia was strange, and the paragraph leading up to it felt almost too strange to not be meaningful somehow. What I like to think the one way ticket to Armenia line means has to do with Armenia being a transcontinental country, a country not quite in Asia or Europe (also a country known for a particular style of humor), a country stuck between two identities or categorizations, just as our protagonist exists somewhere between fame and obscurity. The list is his one way ticket.

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“Glasgow Lullaby” by Rob McClure Smith
Some stories I read and just don’t get right away. ‘Glasgow Lullaby’ by Rob McClure Smith was one. The reason was because I’ve just never come across this kind of dialect before. It was difficult to grab hold of. Admittedly, I don’t take quickly to stories that aren’t written in perfect SWE. I’d never heard of the city of Glasgow before.

So I spent some time researching. Smith’s Interview is especially enlightening. And something wikipedia refers to as Glasgow Patter.

Reading again, and this time not slowing down in an attempt to decipher every single word, there is something endearing about the piece. The tale is frighteningly absurd in itself, and that it’s told with sincerity to put a child to sleep just adds another level of absurdity. It succeeds in giving readers a good, hilarious dose of Glaswegian culture.

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“Night Birds” by Craig Terlson
Craig Terlson’s ‘Night Birds’ is a surprisingly touching little story. And you’re not really sure why after a first read. It’s another one of those where the ending makes you re-read it. A theme of ‘passivity’ developed in my head as I read it over and over. Our hero is passive in his tactics (I wasn’t one of the strongest players, but I wasn’t the weakest… I stayed out of the way… never handling the ball for long…), his mom, at the end, passive in hers.

The ending has so much strength, that sudden shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’, I had a strong sense that his lack of intense participation in the game was related somehow to his mother not calling him.

This piece is wonderfully constructed, with very, very tight writing, from the tomato sauce to the blood on their chins.

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“Quake” by Beth Thomas
Something that makes ‘Quake’ by Beth Thomas so amazing, the shortest story in the issue, is that it’s exactly the right length. Any longer and I don’t think the metaphor of it would’ve come across as powerfully. But as it is, it just kind of slaps you. I felt it right at the end and didn’t even understand what I’d just felt. Like there’s something huge below the surface here. There’s something about the absence of anything else that forces you to focus very sharply on the quake and what it might represent. The metaphor is written so subtly, it’s hardly there, but because we’re given nothing else to consider, nothing else to get in the way, suddenly there it is. If this paragraph was buried in a novel somewhere, I don’t think many people would stop to think about the similarity between it and the “other.” It’s like a kid with a jar full of a hundred different colored marbles standing in front of his class at show-and-tell, it’s the largest jar of marbles anyone’s ever seen, and he puts the jar down and digs in and pulls out just one marble and says, here, look at just this marble, and he passes the marble around so everyone can concentrate on just that one marble, what’s inside of it, what’s it really look like in there.

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“Deep in the Heart of Texas” by Robert Travieso
Reading ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ by Robert Travieso felt like a lesson in creative writing. I thought this was written so well, I read it again and again, trying to nail down why it sounds so cool. What I discovered was an inordinate amount of adjectives and adverbs, which are often the first things discarded in flash. Granted this is the longest story in the issue (I think). And it wasn’t just lots of adjectives and adverbs but interesting adjective/noun, adverb/adjective combinations like A pair of rattlesnakes make frantic, unapologetic love…, His belly hangs imperiously, Mexican warriors outside the shivering door.

Since I have no recollection of learning about the Battle of the Alamo in school, I retreated to wikipedia (again) and discovered that, except for some aesthetic elements Travieso mentions in his Interview, as absurdly (or not?) a re-creation of the event as this story conveys, it’s oddly within the realm of plausibility. Or there at least doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence against it. Bowie and Crockett did both die at the Alamo during a siege while the Texans slept, and I couldn’t seem to find anything that said anything about them meeting each other, or really even having anything to do with each other, which is odd considering how separately legendary each one is (although I guess no one is ever legendary in the present tense, only once they’ve been dead a while, so probably to everyone else at the time they were just average joes).

I personally enjoy these kinds of distortions on history, and the more distorted the better (Am I allowed to do this as a reviewer? Interject my own preferences like that? Whatever. I’m human.). Fiction should be free to do these kinds of things, to say ‘what if’ it would have happened like this.

Best not to try to extrapolate any intention the author may have had here. Maybe this sums it up:

A pack of horseflies flit about without meaning or purpose.

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“Disappearances” by Jeff Vande Zande
‘Disappearances’ by Jeff Vande Zande is another one that needed at least two read-throughs. The references to things disappearing were suddenly everywhere on the second read. And as I sit here writing this, some hours later, reading it over again, I’m noticing more things. There’s a really nice progression from familiarity to unfamiliarity with respect to their surroundings as the story moves along. From crossing the bridge to… Lights glowed along the edges of the highway. I could see buildings. A McDonalds. to… I stared into the darkness as though I might see the river. to… Dad squinted into the darkness out beyond the headlights. to… etc. I really loved how there was the desire on the part of the father for the boy to sleep, as sleep is its own kind of disappearance from everything. His mother is planning to disappear with him. His father is now trying to disappear with him to the extent that he’s able. The town, the world is disappearing around them. All the while he’s disappearing from consciousness.

My favorite line, and the thing that stuck in my head because it was something that didn’t make sense to me on the first read was…

In my side vision, in the glow of the dashboard, his outline was ghostly.

The use of ghostly here is just brilliant. A kind of foreshadow of what he’s eventually going to be to him.

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“This is Just Another Yarn” by Ann Walters
‘This Is Just Another Yarn’ by Ann Walters. What an incredible little story, full of metaphor. I spent a few days on this one, and probably read it too many times, conjuring too many different takes. There were strange things going on in this that at first glance seemed placed with no purpose, but the more I read, the more at least a kind of vague purpose materialized. For me anyway.

In the end, my final take is that of a woman stuck in a lifestyle (knitting, cats, chocolate) that developed after her lover left her a long time ago. That the cat leaves (an interesting scene that seems to mirror, perhaps, the way her lover left?) and the yarn is cut, seem to signify she is in the process of breaking through it all, realizing her own self as something other than the result of some memory.

There’s an interesting feel of the passage of time throughout the piece. From the narration pulling away from the telling, referring to the story as a story within the story, giving the whole thing a kind of globular view, to the kitten growing into a cat instantaneously, the man (her lover?) snoring like the train that used to pass downtown thirty years ago, to the scissors landing without a sound on a cushion of years.

Yarn serves as an amazing, almost duel metaphor, a story (the pun), as well as a kind of web of life (the metaphor) that Moira is entangled in (figuratively) and that the cat gets entangled in (physically), but the cat might be a metaphor as well, another thing that represents the undesirable fate she’s trying to break through.

Well, I’ve gone on too long already, but wait, I’m not done yet…

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“Travel” by Nancy Zafris
‘Travel’ by Nancy Zafris is one that’s leaving me with more questions than answers, leaving me wanting more, so in that sense, perhaps it’s a good choice for the last story of the issue. These two events (paragraphs) seem so strange when put together, yet they work, somehow.

Her dreams were long and empty, a dry confusing desert that kept her search for nothing, refusing to stop.

He would be searching hard for that no one he could blame…

Traveling, searching for nothing, for no one, refusing to stop. This is kind of how I’m reading it all. I have to admit the poker reference near the end is stumping me. It feels deliberately put there, but I’m not making any connection or conjuring any metaphor. Poker is often used as a kind of clichéd metaphor for life (know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em). Does the one photo down refer to Mary Elizabeth? Is it a way to show how he goes about making decisions, confidently, unwaveringly, straight-faced?

There’s ‘guilt’ flying around that I’m not understanding either…

David, are you all right? she whispered close to his face and he pushed her away. A crushing guilt chilled her panic.

She sneaked a guilty look at Mary Elizabeth before hastening to find the paintings.

The latter one really stumps me. Why would this woman feel ‘guilt’ for Mary Elizabeth? What is it about the poker hand of photos that makes her feel this way?

Perhaps I’m searching for things that are probably not there, refusing to stop…

###

Well, my heart, my brain and my ash tray are full. I’m taking this hat off and going to bed.

-Darby

P.S. It was burnt coffee by the way. What happened was, earlier, I had set the coffee maker and turned it on but forgot to put the glass pitcher back in, so the coffee just slowly dripped onto the heating pad, the counter, the floor. What a mess.


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