A new journal ccalled Backwards City Review has just published its first issue, in electronic and print form. The inaugural issue included an excerpt from my forthcoming novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and you can download it from their site.
Once upon a time, Alan's mother gave birth to three sons in three months. Birthing sons was hardly extraordinary — before these three came along, she'd already had four others. But the interval, well, that was unusual.
As the eldest, Alan was the first to recognize the early signs of her pregnancy. The laundry loads of diapers and play clothes he fed into her belly unbalanced more often, and her spin cycle became almost lackadaisical, so the garments had to hang on the line for days before they stiffened and dried completely. Alan liked to sit with his back against his mother's hard enamel side while she rocked and gurgled and churned. It comforted him.
The details of her conception were always mysterious to Alan. He'd been walking down into town to attend day school for five years, and he'd learned all about the birds and the bees, and he thought that maybe his father — the mountain — impregnated his mother by means of some strange pollen carried on the gusts of winds from his deep and gloomy caves. There was a gnome, too, who made sure that the long hose that led from Alan's mother's back to the spring pool in his father's belly remained clear and unfouled, and sometimes Alan wondered if the gnome dove for his father's seed and fed it up his mother's intake. Alan's life was full of mysteries, and he'd long since learned to keep his mouth shut about his home life when he was at school.
He attended all three births, along with the smaller kids — Bill and Donald (Charlie, the island, was still small enough to float in the middle of their father's heart-pool) — waiting on tenterhooks for his mother's painful off-balance spin cycle to spend itself before reverently opening the round glass door and removing the infant within.
(Thanks, Gerry!)
