Glimmer Train Stories, Winter 2009, Issue #69

Excerpts:

E. A. Durden
Mr. Dabydeen
He will buy the goat himself, to curry for dinner he will walk the two miles this morning to Western Beef, where he will see every Hindu woman from Guyana, all there to buy goat.

Xhenet Aliu
You Say Tomato
Shalom meant hello, goodbye, and peace. I used to wonder how people knew which meaning someone actually intended when they said it, but Sue rolled her eyes when I asked her.

Ron Savage
Baby Mine
What people say is this: Blind Margo can predict a future by feeling the bones in your hands.

Colum McCann
Interview by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais
I've come to think, to a large extent, that the terms fiction and nonfiction are there for convenience and to reassure ourselves, but I think if we're truly honest about it all, we would say that we are all storytellers. It's a matter of how we tell the story and how the words are placed on the page.

Johanna Skibsrud
This Will Be Difficult to Explain, and Other Stories
He was a small man, the officer. No bigger than my thumb. When I sat with my brother at the top of the stair, I could, with the tip of it, conceal him entirely. I showed my brother. He laughed. Then came the shot. I covered up his ears.

David Borofka
Coincidence
"There's nothing here. There's nothing wrong with your hand." Buddy looked, then turned, as though by accident he had dropped his injury and left it behind on the sidewalk.

Frederick Reiken
Shadow
I should have told him that she missed her father. Maybe if he had this context. Maybe he would have thought, "I must be helpful to this girl who lost her father." Maybe if I had known how much she missed her father, they would be married today, Beverly and Simon.

David Koon
Four Sisters: Josephine & Dora Laura, Nancy & Mary
But her lazy eye, crooked and brown, was looking at the aisle, and for the first time in my life, I wondered what it was she could see if she sees less, or if she sees more.

Will Boast
Diplomats
To hesitate is to lose, my own father once said. He wrote it in a letter to me when I was seven, a grand letter full of grand advice, just before he left to go out to Oregon to sell personal computers door to door, back when people still thought you could succeed at such things.

Alexander Parsons
Interview by Andrew Scott
I think most beginning writers decide to write without knowing what they're getting into. You're young, you like books, you think: I'll write my own sweet-ass story.

Thisbe Nissen
Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass
"I am from Ukraine," Bogdan enunciated so beautifully it was as though words had a new, higher purpose. "Oh!" She kept nodding, grinning at him, as though she too had been raised in the communist bloc, overwhelmed to meet a comrade.