"Did you regret it?"

"E-Excuse m-m-me?"

"I'm saying did you regret putting a knife in my daughter's throat, you son-of-a-bitch?"

He stood up and thrust his hand around the stranger's throat, slamming him into the wall. The other man desperately scrabbled at his fingers, but the alcohol was molten steel through his veins and his grip squeezed all the tighter.

"P-Please, I-I...I d-didn't...didn't k-know..."

Saliva flew out of his mouth as he spluttered. His face turned purple. With a sudden wrench, the policeman threw him into the ground and kicked him in the stomach. He doubled up and gasped for air.

"You didn't know? You didn't know? That's a nice joke, you son-of-a-bitch. I guess you didn't know all the way up to slashing her throat and hiding her body in the dumpster." He slammed another steel heel into his stomach. "I guess you didn't know it was her seventeenth birthday today. I guess you didn't know she had been looking for ward to meeting her daddy. You didn't know, so everything is forgiven." He laughed and kicked him again. There was the crunch of ribs. The stranger's shirt was a mess of blood, flesh, and bone splinters and all he could do was curl up and sob.

"I didn't think I'd find you," the policeman said, walking circles slowly around him. "It's been a week. What were the chances the murderer would still be sticking around? The chief was just about ready to continue the investigation into the next state. But I'm a lucky man, John. I'm a lucky man."

"I'm...I-I'm s-sorry...P-Please, l-let me...l-let m-me..."

The policeman smashed the heel of his boot into his face. His nose exploded in a fountain of blood. The policeman bent down over his broken face and started to laugh, spit flying in his face. The stench of alcohol was overpowering.

"Seven days, John. Six hours of sleep in seven days. The only thing keeping me was five packs of whiskey and the desire for revenge. And would you believe it, it is so, so sweet." He pulled a picture out of his pocket. It was a picture of a young girl standing with flaming red hair. Her almond-colored eyes crinkled with her smile. The policeman pushed the picture into the stranger's face. It came away smeared with blood.

"Take a good look at the girl you killed. It will be the last thing you ever see."

There was the sliding of metal against metal and an audible sharpness that vibrated in the air. The stranger's breath caught in his throat and his words came out faster than ever.

"No, no, nonono, please no, I promise, sorry, really sorry, no, no - "

"I managed to swipe this from the evidence chest. Poetic, don't you think? The killer's weapon used against him. God knows you deserve a far worse death."

"Please please please, no - "

There was the sound of metal ripping flesh and a scream through the night air. Then all was silent save for the sound of rain.

Structure of Civil War Land in Bad Decline

Point of View: 1st person

Tense: Present


The story is told completely chronologically, with almost all of it taking place in the present, one event after another. The very, very rare instances where the narrator breaks from the present is when he explains something to the audience, i.e. when he describes Mr. A's past and when he describes how they got their fake church. For the most part, however, there are no deviations from complete chronology.

Major events in the story are broken by page breaks. They are, in order:

1) Before narrator talks with Sylvia Loomis about the gangs

2) After the narrator and Mr. A give Quinn the job of dealing with gans

3) After they deal with Quinn's attack by the gangs

4) After Mr. A tells the narrator about the recent troubles in CWL

5) Before they hire Samuel

6) He goes home to his cheating wife

7) Narrator finds severed hand of the boy

8) At Halloween

9) He takes the boys home

1-9 is all rising action. Each event is more extreme than the last, escalating to the climax: his wife leaves him with his sons. The denouement is everything afterwards: him going to Mr. A to find out that CWL was going under, seeing the McKinnons' deaths, meeting Samuel alone at night. There is no resolution to speak of; the story ends tragically, with the narrator losing everything he's ever loved.

Elongating Dreams

On the first night he dreams of a single day.

In his dream he can fly. Two great pairs of red feathery wings sprout from his shoulders, and with these he flies the Earth's circumference. He flies ten thousand miles above the surface. He flies ten thousand miles above the placid oceans and the mottled patchworks of land and the hard outcrops of civilization. In twenty-four hours he has circled back to his starting place, and suddenly his wings begin to melt, feathers disintegrating one by one into the salty sea and he plummets straight down. A second before he hits the water he wakes up, the roar of the waves pounding in his ears.

On the second night he dreams of a single month.

It is Christmas, and he has finally returned home after a long chain of final exams. He returns home like a triumphant hero, the winds of college braved. His family and friends greet him as if he has never left. He knows it will not be long before he departs again, but the thought just makes him treasure the present all the more. He uses the time to catch up with old high school friends, to shop for Christmas presents, to sleep until noon every day in his own room on his own bed. When the day finally comes, he bids everyone a teary farewell and steps into the car, but as he turns around for a final goodbye his vision dims and he wakes up.

On the third night he dreams of a single year.

He wakes up on a deserted shore, choking on spluttering sea water, clothes torn to shreds by the currents, hair soaked with brine. At first it is hard; the nights are cold and lonely, the animals ferocious and uninviting, the hunger ubiquitous and sharp. But he learns to adapt. He manages to find a stock of natural flint and makes himself a fire. By sampling only a few new plants at a time, he manages to eat without poisoning himself. The small rodents look nutritious enough, so he sharpens a stick and thrusts it clean through the chest of a small mouse. Within a year he has built himself a new home from palm leaves and tree trunks, and loneliness no longer stabs him in the gut every night. One day he spies a dark mass on the horizon, black silhouette against a burning sun. It is a ship, he realizes, and before his hopes could even soar he wakes up with tears in his eyes, in his own bed once more.

On the forth night he dreams of a century.

He is on another planet, not himself but something larger, covered in a foul slime, sliding aimlessly across the landscape. He devours anything he finds in his way, and for one hundred years he subsists. On the last day a strange object arrives from the sky, streaking a trail of fire before finally landing. A strange, bipedal organism emerges from within wearing a gleaming suit. The alien steps forward, reaches out an appendage, and then he wakes again into darkness, fingers desperately clawing at his own skin.

On the fifth night he dreams of an epoch.

Ceaseless waves, furious lightning storms, superheated pools of magma spouting from deep within the Earth's core. All it takes is a single instant - a flash of lightning into the water - and a bacteria is born, struggling forward on shaky, amoeboid legs and he remembers nothing else about those ten millions years but the sensation of being ripped from time and place into a stranger's body. His eyes open wide and he does not know who he is, where he is, when he is.

On the sixth night he dreams forever.

Mark Doty Reflection

I have always hated it when my teachers said, "Read your essay out loud. It'll help you catch mistakes." A written work is meant to be read, not spoken. It's possible that something, when spoken aloud, might sound strange, but if on the page it looks perfectly good, why should you change it? After all, the reader won't be speaking the story aloud. How many good written lines, I wonder, would be lost if their authors had decided to read aloud their works beforehand?

This was more prevalent in Mark Doty's reading than in all the readings before that. Prose writers, at least, have the advantage that there is not too large a discrepancy between what they write and what people normally say; prose, after all, is written in the common language of the people. Poetry does not have such a luxury. Its very form elevates it above common prose, to be seen and not heard. In a work where even white space is important, reading aloud a poem destroys its very essence.

This is further complicated by the fact that Doty's poems uses uncommon and foreign words generously. "Lumina, aurora, aureole?" "For a forest by Faberge, all cloisonné and enamel". When spoken, these words lose much of their impact. If we see the word on the page, we can be certain that it is exactly what it is: an uncommon word, deftly chosen for its purpose. But if we hear it spoken, suddenly we are not so sure. Does he pronounce it differently than we do? Did he say another word, but a trick of the ears made us hear something different? Am I supposed to understand what that word means?

"(dis?)guises; poetry" - and how does one even begin to speak aloud the parenthesis, the question mark mid-word, the semi-colon?

Nonetheless, despite the fact that his poetry was ruined by narration, I understood that his works were top-quality. The mark of a great work is that lines just pop out at you, sticking in your memory even long after the author himself is forgotten. The fact that his works are free verse yet still managed to make me like them is an even greater feat. "Brass buttons tumbling to the floor. Who's it for?" "plain prose, exquisite (dis?)guises; poetry, music, clothes." The rhyme is wonderful. It comes at the most unexpected times, yet the syllables fit perfectly together as a key in a lock. This is yet another problem with reading aloud poetry - much of the rhyme is lost when the words are subject to the reader's murky and imperfect speech.

Problem Child Review

Nothing in life is perfect. You must take the good with the bad, and in Problem Child you must take the good with the forgettable. Some of the works in the literary magazine are undeniably top-notch; like most amateur literary magazines, however, these gems share company with works that don’t quite compare.

Starting off strong, the magazine opens with “Sicily,” a prose poem that splits all the differences between Cuba and Sicily into cigars and pizza – and, amazingly, succeeds. Two complex cultures broken down into common household items. “Sicily” evokes simple pleasures, creating images of Sicilian pizza and Cuban cigars so real I could almost smell the bread rising and taste the ashes on my tongue. Unfortunately, the rest of the poems in the magazine go downhill from there. I have told you before of my dislike for free verse. I was disappointed to see that the rest of the magazine contained nothing but that, with none of the treasured forms I hold so dear. That is not to say the rest of the poems are completely devoid of merit – “Never Never in Neverland” and “Common Ancestry” stand out as the other two excellent poems – but the magazine reaches its poetic peak with opening “Sicily.”

It is in its short-short stories that the magazine truly shines. Unfortunately, “The Memory Man” is the first that pops up, and although its premise is great, the style is overstated, too much is said. The author has too little faith in his reader. Instead of taking a melancholic stroll down memory lane, I trudged through it under the glare of the summer sun.

“What Kills You” is the second short-short in the magazine and by far my favorite. The beginning is all mystery: who is Yemeni (a vaguely Middle Eastern name, but another paragraph in the reader realizes they are not in the Middle East)? Who are the Guardians? What world do they live in? Like all short-shorts, very few of these questions are answered, except for the first, in lovely detail. In two short pages we come to know all of Yemeni. We see his past relationships through the lens of the contemplative present and mourn with him all that was never meant to be. A true testament to the skill of the author is that I never felt sad at the death of such a sympathetic main character; his life had been one long chain of tragedies and his death, inevitably, had simply been the final link.

Not all the short stories in the collection are as brilliant. “Sweet” fails to truly communicate the intricacies of the narrator’s parents, “Two Tickets to Warsaw” never quite achieves the humdrum, regretful tone it imitates, and the premise of “Something Dirty for My Wife” is slightly too contrived for the story to stand alone, but even these are worth a read (and certainly more so than the poetry). The other short-short I enjoyed a great deal was “Remnants,” but it, too, suffered from problems of overstatement. The overstatement, however, did not take away too much from the story’s plot or tone, and the ending will always be a dark, deliciously unexpected twist.

One final note: the magazine is sloppy. I do not expect The New Yorker levels of attention to detail, but its systematic problems are too pervasive to ignore. Several times the spaces between words were not present, the font was inconsistent through the piece, and even some phrases were duplicated right next to the original phrase. I would not call these huge problems, but when they did appear, they detracted from enjoyment of the story. I was more amazed than anything else that mistakes that should have been eliminated on just a cursory proofreading still appeared.

This Minute, This Hour

I grab my coat and head outside. It is a clear day, warm, sunny, moderately windy, the kind of day that you wish for on rainy Mondays as you lay your head down on the school desk. Dead leaves crunch underfoot with every step: ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. I take my time; there is no use in hurrying.

John's voice had been urgent enough, but I knew him well enough to know that it was probably his typical overreaction. He had always been a passionate, excitable boy. In our freshman year of highschool, he once convinced the teacher to let the whole class outside to look at a dinosaur fossil he "discovered" on the baseball field. It turned out to be several mud-encrusted coat hangers a janitor had forgotten to clean up. His face had turned as red as his hair.

It was not an isolated incident. For as long as I could remember, ever since grade school, John had been like that. My earliest memory of him was him agreeing to eat a live earthworm for ten dollars - ten dollars had been a lot back then. In middle school his antics escalated, resulting in him almost being expelled from our school for passing around pills he told us would allow us to see aliens - it turned out to be LSD. I don't think he knew about it, for he was not a malicious person, but I suspect that even had he known he was handing out drugs, he would not have cared.

People have wondered why I was friends with such a boy. My parents lived in constant fear of me inviting him to our house, and more than once the school guidance counselor asked me if I was being coerced into hanging out with him. I myself am not sure of the reason we are friends, for I think his antics as stupid as everyone else does. If I had to pin it down to a single reason...well, if there was one thing good about John, behind his stupid recklessness, behind his desperate desire for attention, behind his disregard for the well-being of his friends, it was his tenacity. Our sun would have gone supernova by the time John learns from his mistakes. Because despite continuous streams of disappointments, he was always convinced that he was on the verge of a great discovery, that he would be the first to do it, that his next prank would garner the adoration of our highschool's girls. He blazed as brightly as a comet.

I have not seen him for several years. After highschool, I had gone on to college and he...our last conversation together, on that last night of summer with the crystal palaces of our childhood trembling before us, he had said to me, "You do well in school, man. Me? I'm bustin' outta this town. Las Vegas, LA, Hollywood, who knows? I'm gonna strike it rich. In a few years, everyone'll know my name, you'll see - and then you can tell all ya university pals: 'I knew that man. I grew up with him. We were best friends.' "

And that was that. We had each other's phone numbers and email, but it had just been too much. After a few sporadic attempts to communicate in the first semester of college, we stopped contacting each other altogether. It seemed painfully sad to me, now, how we had drifted apart, but I do not remember ever feeling so sad back then.

I glance at my watch. 3:00 p.m. The minute hand overlaps the hour hand exactly, and as I continue to stare it moves further and further away, past the four, the five, the six. Once it reaches the nine, I smile, for now it has reached the end of its journey and is now going back to the way they once were, the minute and hour hands of a clock, diverging and converging and diverging again...

I pull up into his driveway.

An Izze Can

Izze can

1) A perfect cylinder, slightly taller than a Coke can but much thinner.

The producers of the beverage went for a more original design to hide their true intentions: the can is sleek and pretty to look at, but by my estimation it only holds about 80% the volume of liquid as a regular soda can.

2) "Sparkling Clementine," the tagline promises.

A rather bold boast. "I taste so good I put regular Orange to shame," the can says. "I sparkle like a beauty pageant winner. Clementine. Have you even heard of it, you poor clod? Exotic, we know."

3) It is as cold as ice. Water droplets cling to the side and slowly drip down.

It looks delicious, so delicious. Refrigerated Izze on a hot summer day, a better thirst quencher I cannot imagine. How daring it would be to lick the condensed water droplets along its surface, tongue darting out to catch a single bead of water on its tip. Simply holding the can makes you feel refreshed.

4) The logo is simple, but very hard to describe. It looks like a six-petaled flower. Each petal is smooth wedge, perfectly equidistant from each other.

Logos are important things. I know some companies spend tons of money on such things; Pepsi, for example, spent several million of their red-and-blue logo. I wonder how much Izze spent on theirs.

5) You know that fizzy taste sodas have? The malty, slightly numbing taste? It's the taste of carbonate, and Izze tastes like that, only five times more fizzy, five times more malty, five times more numbing. Its sweetness is subtle, like the makers added fruit juice as an afterthought. The sweetness complements the fizziness, not the other way around.

It holds up to its boast. I drink five of these things every day, and writing this makes me want to pop up another.