Hunger Mountain

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Excerpts from Hunger Mountain’s Spring 2005 Issue, #6

James seems to recover himself for a moment. He relaxes a bit, licks his lips, stares at the revolver in his hand as though he’s never seen it before. Deliberately, he sets it down on the desktop, beside the Bible, and withdraws his hand from it. –A complaint? he asks, his tone a model of child-like wonderment. –On the anniversary of Our Dear Savior’s birth? Who, at this most joyful time of year, could possibly have a complaint of any sort?

— Pinckney Benedict, The Bear-Man

[Achsa Sprague’s] hands and body twitched and jerked as if she were being subjected to a series of galvanic shocks. If the trance was successful – if she was seeking to deliver a message – she was conscious of an impulse to blurt out certain words. Sometimes, to her horror, the words and phrases were grammatically incorrect.

— Sara Rath, In My Present Heaven: Achsa Sprague (1827-1862)

Does it mean everything, something or nothing that Nathaniel Hawthorne was my great-great-grandfather?

— Alison Hawthorne Deming, Teaching a Bear to Dance: On Writing and the Meaning of Place

Tipped back in his recliner, my father dozes and wakes when the gunfire gets loud or the shelling starts. I sit in my mother’s recliner with the dog snoring beside me, watching Easy Company fight their way from Normandy through France, from France into Holland. Four episodes, five, six. In front of the TV, we’re all right. We are back in the war now, where he is a soldier, and I am his daughter who listens and learns.

— Pam Durban, Veterans

I give up on the giraffes and instead touch all of the nail polish bottles on her dresser, wishing I had the one that’s called Holiday Pink, holding it up to my fingers to see if it’s my color. We don’t have nail polish at my house. My mother with her plain fingernails says it’s not very practical.

— Marie Ostarello, Do You Believe in Mary Worth?

Her colleagues supplied companionship from time to time, and she’d gone to flea markets with them, concerts, and trips to Des Moines, but they were like the extra bread supplied at restaurants while one waited for the main course.

— Leslee Becker, The Yellow House

In the week she and Jason had been in India, Danielle realized, they had seen only peaceful, contented children; even this baby’s tears were mild and easily comforted. How unlike New York, where you couldn’t walk half a block without some brat shrieking, where revved-up children were continually having meltdowns like miniature nuclear bombs.

— Alexandra Enders, Level Best

He chased goddesses as his own personal religion. He was in a frenzy to fall in love, and then desperate to fall out of love again. He rode to the four directions in search of new women as part of his ever-expanding personal worship service. Maybe the great Grandfathers understood.

— Rae Brown, My Kachina

A couple times I dreamed just that, normal deer with metal pressed in their gums. Then I dreamed I shot a buck and went to gut him, and I found he had a plastic bag for a belly. After that, I dreamed I was out walking and found glass scat, I dreamed leaves falling as ash. Then those dreams passed, too, and I stopped dreaming animals, I stopped dreaming woods at all.

— Ann Pancake, Mogey