Amarillo Bay Contents
Volume 9 Number 4

Fiction

Behavior Modification   by Alice K. Boatwright
Nothing has changed in my mother's kitchen since she died two years ago. If she were magically to return, she would be able to put her hand on the garlic press without hesitation and know exactly where to find her cast iron frying pan, the salt, her favorite old wooden spoon. When I arrive to cook my father's dinner each evening, I slip on a flowered cotton apron that I made her in the ninth grade, and I know that, although I have taken on some of her responsibilities, in this place she is still the pilot light. I am only the hand with the match. continue

The Day   by Dennis Yates
As soon as the man rose, he wandered to the back door and opened it. The ginger cat that he expected--ears crooking downward and gold eyes narrowed, miffed at him for oversleeping--didn't appear. It had begun raining steadily the evening before, but the storm was expected to trail off by afternoon. Later a blue dome would arrive, scratched clean of clouds, and he imagined himself down by the lake with his back pressed against a sun-warmed rock, surrounded by foxglove. He found pleasure in making his simple plans, of seeing how well his morning visions meshed with what the day had brought with it. continue

Fraternité   by Gustavo Bondoni
The biting, horizontal snowfall made it difficult to look into Wilson's eyes. Even so, however, I was certain that the distance in the look he gave me owed more to the wayward direction of his thoughts than to physical obstacles presented by the hostile environs. continue

Grandma Cass   by Duncan MacCarthy Whitmire
It's the cigarette smoke that trails off the lit end and never gets inhaled. It's the deer that hesitates beside the road instead of jumping into the headlights. To Grandma Cass, life was the sum of all the things that could have killed you, and didn't. continue

The Letter   by Claudia Labin
A blustery gust of wind and sleet pushes her through the doors of the Aspidistra, her black princess raincoat billowing behind her like the cape of a nineteenth-century heroine. Who could she be . . . Anna Karenina? The thought makes her smile. She is such a hopeless romantic, still despite all the despites, still at thirty-nine. She shakes her big brown leather satchel and feels immediately welcomed into the safety and warmth of the old bookstore. continue

Creative Nonfiction

Cleaning Away Crazy   by Tammy Peacy
Residents of E House crowded around me in clusters of three or four, watching as I stood on a step ladder, my arms stretched above my head, scrubbing the wood paneling with a rag dipped in the water and Murphy's Oil Soap solution. The water blackened after only a few rinses of the rag, an old scrap of t-shirt, and I went through the entire bottle of cleaner before finishing three of the four walls of the foyer. My audience bored quickly and interrupted often, asking for cigarettes or something from their personal shelf. I was irritated that no one offered to help, to join in my tirade against their mental illness, but why should they? In some way, whether directly or indirectly, they were paying for me to be there. continue

Poetry

Crossing a Construction Site   by William Doreski
Hot earth-smell thickens the breeze.
My footsteps feel too flimsy
to support me beyond the ditch
hacked across the intersection. continue

Wind-Flower   by William Doreski
By August the anemone
or wind-flower has gone by,
leaving its foliage creased continue

Hanging On   by karla k. morton
When the Alzheimers set in
she clung to her coat hangers. continue

We Who Wish To Sing in the Morning   by Oliver Rice
I would not argue
for Sir Christopher Wren nor Frank Lloyd Wright,
for the pyramid nor the skyscraper. continue

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