Number 8, January 1999 IN THIS ISSUE... Mourner in Kohl by Jane Carr Purple by Justin Elga Smokewagon by Alex Vermeychuk Eating Flounderly by Megan Gilman Dissection by Justin Goldberg

EATING FLOUNDERLY       My name is Simon. My sister's is Trinny, my brother's is Derry, and our mother is dying. We live on a cliff. We listen to a lot of dance music and watch for airplanes, and Trinny fishes our dinner out of the lagoon each day before dark. It's not an accident that we live here. Our mother wanted to live near the sky, and after our father threw himself into the sea, our mother saw no reason to pack up and leave. It is too bad, though, that we didn't have a choice.       The cliff is real high and real steep. We tried to leave once, but thesteps began to crumble away beneath us, and we lost Alberta. It wasn't as tragic as Derry will make it sound; Alberta was sick of the cliff. But Derry accused our mother of murder. He thinks she's killed us already by building a family on a cliff.       It really is remarkable how many recipes there are for flounder. Trinny catches two or three a day, Derry cleans them, and I prepare them. They are funny fish, flat with bulging eyes. Some nights I fry them, some nights I bake them, and when we're feeling posh, we have sushi. We used to have a telephone and our mother would call her friends in all the major cities to keep us up to date; she would also call her psychic, so we would know what to expect. But the connection was lost in the last typhoon and now we just have to guess the trends and expect the best. Derry always expects the worst; Derry is not much fun to live with on a cliff.       Trinny and I hosted a dinner party one night, but we didn't invite our mother or Derry. When our mother discovered that two sets of good silver and silk napkins were missing, she became suspicious and started asking questions, so we invited her. Then our mother said we were cruel, since Derry lives in our house and has to eat, too. So Trinny went upstairs and asked Derry to come down; she lied and said his invitation must have been lost in the mail, but Derry saw right through that. He locked his bedroom door and didn't come out for days; it made me angry because I had to clean and cook the fish that week. But our mother says it is harder for Derry to live on the cliff, since he was already in second grade when they moved. Trinny was in fourth grade, though, and she has adjusted just fine. Alberta and I were born up here.       My room looks different than Trinny's or Derry's, but that's because they brought a lot of things with them during the move. They have photographs and posters, but my walls are bare. They have books and stuffed animals; I have a piece of carpet that I used to sleep with, and still do when I wake up from a nightmare about our father. It is an extra piece from the turquoise carpet in the downstairs living room, and it is very soft. Trinny has a blanket on her bed that some relative I'll never meet made for her when she was born. I was jealous of it and tried to steal it, until Derry gave me his old sleeping bag that he used his one summer at Cub Scout camp. I keep it rolled up at the foot of my bed, and I'm going to sleep in it tonight, outside. continued...