Number 6, May 1998 IN THIS ISSUE... Dead Deer by Jonathan Queally SoHo Dec. 6, 1997 by Pat Akhimie The Wedding of a Prodigal Son by Bogachan Sahin Auction by Dan Stout Strange in the Night by Jane Carr from The Rainy Season by Kimberlee Kimura La Reine Morte - Paris, 1942 by Jennifer Boittin

DEAD DEER Now, when she drives her son to school she let's him play video games, his head glued to that world. She herself can hardly bear to see that disformed buck, his hind legs under his rump like a college linesman, head propped up on the curb, ear to the ground, listening for an offsides call, or false start. When they finally pass she plucks the game from his hands, says, 'That's enough.' Since the county contracted out the removal of dead deer from the roads people have been complaining that carcasses are lying in the breakdown lane and on the shoulders for weeks at a time. There is a common feeling that someone is at fault. The patrolman, in his souped-up Chevy, hates the sight of blood. When he was a boy he woke to find his dog on the back porch, mauled by a coyote. Her neck had been ripped and torn away like christmas paper, her ribs stuck out, dark gray bones with bloodied hair clinging to them, and her eyes dripped white mucus. One deer was said to have been sighted with tall grass growing all around it where the highway commission lawn mower operator had edged around it as he would a tree or boulder. The grass was swaying in the wind but commuters could see the black nose sticking out, or a leg, or a hoof; something reaching out from those greening tendrils. He'd come around once with the blade, then again, closing the distance between the sweet smell of chopped dew grass and the rot. --Jonathan Queally