•   CONTENTS                                                             Before Paphos
                           Bone Women
            Art Gallery                                                  by Loretta Casteen
        o
                           By Eliot Fintushel
            Articles                                                     8 January 2007
        o
                           12 December 2005
            Columns                                                      It starts again. The baby
        o
                                                                         begins to cough and choke.
                           "What I wanna wake up and see
            Fiction
        o
                           ugly?"—Redd Foxx
                                                                        Locked Doors
      o Poetry
                    Hildy loved me bad. Pudding of a woman, the
                                                                        by Stephanie Burgis
                    moons behind her cheaters waxed for the
         Reviews
      o
                    love of me. She bleated after me, udders            1 January 2007
      o Archives    wagging, tongue lolling, buttocks dimpling,
                    attended by flies. She was all armpit hair and You can never let anyone
•   ABOUT US                                                            suspect, his mother told
                    thigh flesh. The cheaters, thick as hog's
                    hooves, slid, slid down her nose, till arrested him. That was the first rule
      o Staff
                                                                        she taught him, and the last,
                    by the bump. She nudged them with a fat
                    finger, then grinned. She wrote me love notes. before she left him here
      o Guidelines
                    I let her visit me up at the A-frame where I alone with It.
      o Contact     lived with Matt and Al. Matt: laconic,
                                                                        Heroic Measures
                    tight-muscled, trim as a bull's pizzle. Al:
      o Awards      electric, slight, sizzle skip on the hot griddle of by Matthew Johnson
                    his libido, all eye and brow. They hated her
      o Banners
                    being there. Her mouth foamed with                  18 December 2006
•                   abashment—she spoke, she didn't speak:
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                    ecstasies of impossible love. Don't ever let Pale as he was, it was hard
      o Donate      that person come here again, they'd tell me. to believe he would never
                    She haunted the window seat and the fridge rise from this bed. Even in
         Bookstore
      o
                    nook. She left the imprint of her navel in the the darkest times, she had
                                                                        never really feared for him;
      o Merchandise screen door. Bowl-like, it was, like the sag in
                    a cake fallen in. She mumbled half to herself, he had always been strong,
                    half to me, barely daring to exist, much less to so strong.
•   COMMUNITY
                    love, much less to love me.
                                                                        Love Among the Talus
      o Forum
                    The mirror arrests me. I pull the hem of my
                    shirt out of my pants, and I am deflated at the by Elizabeth Bear
      o Readers'
         Choice     inflation of my belly. See it puddle over the 11 December 2006
                    beltline. Pouches and pannier bags of fat. I
                    am 56, and things are now an issue that never Nilufer raised her eyes to
                    so much as entered the consciousness of the his. It was not what women
                    young man I used to be—"things": i.e., my did to men, but she was a
                    girth. If a trim and pretty woman catches my princess, and he was only a
                    regard, I have to look at the geezer on her bandit. "I want to be a
                    left, at the child on her right, dissembling. Or I Witch," she said. "A Witch
                    screw up my eyes as if abstracted, sublime. and not a Queen. I wish to
                                                                        be not loved, but wise. Tell
                    But I had loads of capital back in the A-frameyour bandit lord, if he can
                    days. Why did I put up with Hildy? "Put up give me that, I might accept
                    with?" Hell, I encouraged her. A friend of          his gift."
                    Hildy's reproached me: I kept her around to
                    flatter myself, she said. That's an odd thought. Archived Fiction Dating
                    How could I be flattered by a courtier like back to 9/1/00
                    Hildy? And yet it stung me to hear it—a sure
                    sign of veracity. All this was shortly before my
                    suicide attempt. Did I keep her around out of