A Tidings of Magpies

by Joyce Sutphen It was one of those days when the sun poured gold into the air, and flecks of light floated in shafts that fell through the branches of yellow leaf and green. We’d had dinner at a place on the edge of a lake, and now we were going back to town. There was a simple way to get there, but she didn’t take it. Instead, we drove the country roads with the corn rows flicking by, each one visible for a half second, then gone. “Hello, hello, hello,” they said, then “Good-bye, bye, bye, bye.” The soybeans, we agreed, had turned burgundy overnight, but it was the cornfields we watched, as if we were waiting for the waters to open, as if we might cross over Jordan.

Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959 by William Matthews The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue, particulate, the opposite of dew. We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped and two nights out of three, like us, they'd lose. But "like us" is wrong: we had no result three nights out of three: so we had heroes. And "we" is wrong, for I knew none by name among that hazy company unless I brought her with me. This was loneliness with noise, unlike the kind I had at home with no clock running down, and mirrors.

by Louis Jenkins All those things that have gone from your life, moon boots, TV trays and the Soviet Union, that seem to have vanished, are really only changed. Dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth but evolved into birds and crock pots became bread makers and then the bread makers all went to rummage sales along with the exercise bikes. Everything changes. It seems at times (only for a moment) that your wife, the woman you love, might actually be your first wife in another form. It's a thought not to be pursued….Nothing is the same as it used to be. Except you, of course, you haven't changed…well, slowed down a bit, perhaps. It's more difficult nowadays to deal with the speed of change, disturbing to suddenly find yourself brushing your teeth with what appears to be a flashlight. But essentially you are the same as ever, constant in your instability.