Amarillo Bay™ Literary Magazine - Something Good To Read™

Amarillo Bay Contents
Volume 5 Number 3

Current Issue

We are pleased to present the third issue of our fifth year, published on Monday, 4 August 2003. We hope you enjoy browsing through our extensive collection of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry! (See the Previous Issues list to discover the works in our collection, including the ability to search through the issues.)

Fiction

Fallen Soldier
by Em Kersey
Grandpa McLeod, or "Pop," as everyone called him, didn't miss his wife, Elsie, but now and then when he happened to think about her, which wasn't often, he would look up cagily at whichever of the children or grandchildren happened to be visiting him at the Sugar Creek Nursing Home, and say, "Oh, my, how I miss Elsie. She was the light of my life, and now it's gone out."

The Graceful Plumber
by Suzi Vitello
I married Edward because his parents loved me and mine had split up. I married Edward because he trusted gravity. I married Edward because I worked in a hospital where young women were dying of malignancies and where babies blew out birthday candles from prisons of tubes and wires, never having felt sky on their faces. But mostly, I married Edward because I wanted to be him.

Leslie Stops the Whole Damn Funeral
by David Breeden
Leslie stopped the whole damned funeral. Which wasn't all that hard—I mean, funerals don't move along like football games or even good TV shows. No. They drag, sort of. Like golf on TV or something like that.

Seventh Period Salvageables
by Susan Fabry Daniels
Charles Gundersen considered ditching seventh period, but the memo was from Dean Harrigan, which meant that consequences for declining the summons would be severe. At lunch he asked his limited circle of friends if anyone else had been pulled from his usual study hall assignment, but no one else had been. At first he was disappointed. Charles didn't like to feel singled out, and he didn't like to enter into strange situations without an ally. Then Charles reflected on Jeff with his unlit cigarette dangling from his lip, Mike picking the cover off of a golf ball and Mark thoughtfully excavating cerumen with his pinkie tip. On the other hand, he thought, perhaps being singled out was a positive thing.

Creative Nonfiction

Frederic Family Days
by Jenny Rose Ryan
My high school had chipped, mauve hallways lined with blue lockers that we seniors leaned against during lunch hour. Our feet stretched to the middle of the hall, and if a junior-class boy walked nearby, he'd kick our feet as hard as he could. He didn't like the way my friends and I dressed--the guys wore large-legged jjeans and sometimes old ladies' muumuus. I dressed like a grandma, they said. Our town only had 1200 people, when I rounded higher, and we thought they weren't ready for our club-kid-clothes. We set ourselves apart by starting rebellious garage bands, coloring our hair with red, green or blue Kool-Aid, and making dandelion headdresses in the field behind the greenhouse. We wore them to class for controversy. We met at Frederic Family Days events, stoned on summer vacation and tepid June air. Not much else was available for entertainment, save for the three-screened, second-rate movie theater five towns away.

Poetry

The Making of a Man
by Darlene Moore Berg
Mud scraped up out of the riverbank
mottled clay, streaks of brown, rust, tan
Squish this mess through your
beefy hands: roll, press, knead

Off W, Down V. Enter Arcadia
by Darlene Moore Berg
The road signs of the twenty-first century recede,
escape beckons around a curve, up a ridge
through low-lying mountains, second-growth forests.

Welcome to Shy Road
by Darlene Moore Berg
It's easy to overlook the intersection,
a backward "y" from any direction,
but it's where I live, Shy Road.
A zip code of anonymity.

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Works by Issue

2003	Volume 5 Number 3, 4 August, 2003 Volume 5 Number 2, 5 April, 2003 Volume 5 Number 1, 3 February, 2003
2002	Volume 4 Number 4, 4 November, 2002 Volume 4 Number 3, 5 August, 2002 Volume 4 Number 2, 6 May, 2002 Volume 4 Number 1, 4 February, 2002
2001	Volume 3 Number 4, 5 November, 2001 Volume 3 Number 3, 6 August, 2001 Volume 3 Number 2, 7 May, 2001 Volume 3 Number 1, 5 February, 2001
2000	Volume 2 Number 4, 6 November, 2000 Volume 2 Number 3, 7 August, 2000 Volume 2 Number 2, 1 May, 2000 Volume 2 Number 1, 7 February, 2000
1999	Volume 1 Number 3, 1 November, 1999 Volume 1 Number 2, 2 August, 1999 Volume 1 Number 1, 3 May, 1999

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Amarillo Bay
Volume 5 Number 3