WE’RE READING NEW FICTION AND NONFICTION with an eye toward the April 2012 issue. If you’d like to submit, please follow the link below, leave a short bio note and anything else we might need to know. We are particularly interested in work of medium length, say 2000–4000 words, but will read whatever falls upon our plate, and we will try to be speedy in our reply. Many thanks for your interest.
Is posted, with wonderful stories and poems from Richard Weems, Angela Ball, Garrett Ashley, Jennifer Pashley and others. Just click the headline above for transport.
Julia knocked on the door and I answered in a pair of ratty blue jeans, holding a putter and three golf balls. She had a friend with her, a teenage boy, who did all the talking at first. He delivered a scripted speech about creation versus evolution, and read from Hebrews something that said that every house has a builder. He said some other things. Julia was wearing a white dress that hung just below her knees. Pretty thing. Read more »
The man behind her said, “Let me ask you a question,” but she didn’t turn to see what the question would be. Something about what he said bothered her—it was the way he put it. She was out of sorts today, but, nevertheless, what he said was not the same as asking, “Can I ask you something?” Or saying, “Excuse me, I’ve been wondering…” Read more »
The mailman delivers the package on Tuesday. I rip open the small white Fed-ex envelope and a clear zip-lock sandwich bag falls out from between two pieces of cardboard. Inside is the necklace—a large metal cutout of two fists side by side with pinkies extended. “Too much rock for one hand.” It hangs from a cheap metal chain. Read more »
He had been watching her for four years—watering her plants, grooming her plants. First in grad school, then when they moved in together in Cambridge, and later in their first house as a newly married couple with house plants. It had taken years for him to credit: to observe, to suspect, to hypothesize about, and finally to believe. Read more »
Hello there, I say, and you’re stunned, so stunned you don’t say anything back, you just stare, stare open-mouthed and silent like I’m a ghost. And okay, all right: that’s what I am. People eventually stop calling when calls are not returned. The reflection in the mirror starts to look like someone else—or no one at all. Read more »
The photograph is scuffed. She is perfect and visible. There is a horse tangled in her hair. It will be two years yet before it escapes. She doesn’t know, though she is smiling out to you from within the picture’s pool, she doesn’t know yet whether next week she’ll have grown or shrunk by twenty feet, but she knows size is always shifting, and she knows light makes image possible. Read more »
The Zanesville Bear Cub & the Puritan Tradition
A truism of American history and thought is our country’s tendency to project evil onto an object and then attempt to destroy that object. We call this “the Puritan tradition,” and it includes woods, Indians, women presumed to be witches, the entire South, New York City when near-bankruptcy, smokers, moderate drinkers and eaters of transfats, practitioners of Islam, those whom the Republicans call “aliens,” and, most recently, exotic wildlife set loose in the small town of Zanesville, Ohio. Read more »
mistranslation after Chinese “duck” riddle
Just one among the many ground-scrapers–
all my structures shaken from the rattle of the trains.
Everyone here balances their duties with such accommodating posture;
poses for their big dance number (I put down my book to watch):
Shoulders Up! And Stumble Back!
But it’s hard, everyone drops their intangibles,
rushes through the yapping doors with great chalance.
That’s it. My precarious agenda still in its allotted space. I turn it on and off. On and off. On and off.
We’ve put up the Fall 2011 issue, which you may access via the top menu. It is very nearly a thrill a minute, with work by Kim Chinquee, Rich Ives, Mark Budman, Inderjeet Mani, Christopher Merkner, Robert Pope, PJ Underwood, and a host of others. Please to read and enjoy.
Ninety-one days after I quit smoking, my wife bushwhacked me with a brochure for Our Lady of Consolation. I was already in bed with a serial killer novel. Lake finished brushing her hair, then poked her hand into a purse hanging on the doorknob, fished out the brochure and dropped it in my lap. On the cover—an aerial photograph of a white stone monastery nestled among bushy pines.
“You need a break,” she said.
He’d always been stunned by his wife’s beauty when she slept. Sleeping, her natural beauty was undeniable, entirely uninfluenced by his feelings, her feelings, their various difficulties with one another, resentments, by their complex histories, unfulfilled longings, secrets. In repose, there was nothing to interfere with the undeniable fact of her physical loveliness. You might even say angelic. He would say Perfect, if he believed in perfection, or believed that any one deliverance of beauty, any one manifestation of it, or any one vessel shaped into some form of it, could be considered ‘more’ beautiful than some other deliverance, manifestation, shape.
Click the link for a first look at Jurgen Fauth’s Kino, a startling novel coming next year from Atticus Books.
When I stepped barefoot on the bee I was allergic to bees. The Jesus-man steadied me with an even gaze. My attraction to the Jesus-man may have had something to do with feeling like a fraud, which I’d been feeling for too long. Read more »
The summer issue of Blip Magazine is now available on Smashwords as an ebook called Blip Reader 2.3. It is selling for $1.99 and is available in all ebook formats (Nook, Kindle, iPad, etc.). Soon it should be available at B&N, Amazon, iBookstore, and others. This may be a dubious achievement; we are not sure.
Waitress
When I was young and had to rise at 5 am
I did not look at the lamplight slicing
through the blinds and say: Once again
I have survived the night. I did not raise
my two hands to my face and whisper:
This is the miracle of my flesh. I walked
toward the cold water waiting to be released
and turned the tap so I could listen to it
thrash through the rusted pipes.
I cupped my palms and thought of nothing.
We invite submissions of 500‑3000 words, fiction and nonfiction, for the fall issue of Blip Magazine. Submissions should be sent as MSWord files (doc or docx) attached to an e-mail with a short bio. You may also include your text directly in the e-mail. Submissions close on or about Sept. 21, 2011. Please send your work to editors@blipmagazine.net. We will contact only those writers whose work we hope to publish. The fall issue will be available online here at Blip Magazine, and as an e-book on Amazon and the Apple iBookstore.
We’re pleased to feature an excerpt from James Whorton’s new novel Angela Sloan, just published by Free Press. Check the Features page above or go straight to “Leaving DC.”
Jacinda Russell’s Something Between Want and Desire
Jacinda Russell’s & Nancy Douthey’s In Search of the Center
