Contents
The Handgun
Disneyland, from Antaeus
Culture Shock
Romance: A Prose Villanelle
Your Story
The Coming Triumph of the Free World (originally titled “Rick DeMarinis to Q”), from The Quarterly
The Swimmer in Hard Light (originally titled “The Swimmer”), from The Malahat Review
The Flowers of Boredom, from The Antioch Review
Pagans, from Harper’s Magazine
Mole, from Harper’s Magazine
Queen (originally titled “Tenderloin”) from Colorado State Review
Your Burden Is Lifted, Love Returns
Red Chair
Medicine Man, from The Atlantic
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“What I am telling you is that there is a great dark …
consensus …
that sweeps things along to their inevitable conclusion.
There is an intelligence behind it, but, believe me, it is not human.
It is the intelligence of soil, the thing that lifts trees and flowers out of the ground.
I am too astonished and thrilled to be frightened by it.”
Lamar saw, even then, that Randy Voss was crazy,
but what he had said made a lasting impression.
And over the years he has come to adopt Voss’s idea as his own.
But it was something he was unable to talk about to anyone else,
not even his wife.
How could you convince anyone that in this industry no single individual,
or group of individuals,
suspects the existence of a vital sub-rosa mechanism
that produces and deploys our beautifully elegant weapons?
How could you say to someone that the process is holistic,
that a headstrong organic magic is at work,
or that a god presides?
(From “The Flowers of Boredom” (first published in Antioch Review, Winter, 1988)
