Amarillo Bay Contents
Volume 9 Number 1

Fiction

Floating   by K.C. Hutchinson
First, there's a sharp crack. It's a sound I've never heard in real life, one so loud that it drowns out every other sound in the world. It echoes, repeating around the store, slapping the smooth glass faces of the cooler doors, the metal shelves full of pop cans and pet food tins, and the plastic cases of the videos and DVDs on the display stand. continue

Irretito Animae   by Robert Wexelblatt
On a rainy Tuesday in September, 1751, Roland Busette, Bishop of Nantes, ordered his carriage to take him to the town of Cholet where Jules La Detterie, the Bishop had just learned, lay on his deathbed. Cholet sits on the northern approach to the hills of Vendée, so it was an uphill journey from the Loire made more arduous by the ceaseless rain. Busette was determined to speak with the philosopher, who had twice been expelled from France and had only recently returned from Prussia. In his robe the Bishop placed a small blue velvet pouch and a copy of La Detterie's latest tract, already included on the Index and under state review. In it, the freethinker, presumably for the final time, reiterated his arguments against the existence of God, confirmed his materialism, detailed the Church's baleful influence on human affairs, and laid out a two-stage hedonism in which the only value that trumped private pleasure was that of the public. As always, the Bishop found La Detterie's style captivating, even seductive: calm, level-headed, logical, untainted by rancor, defiance, or compunction. continue

Love Hollow   by Mark Spencer
Frank leans close. "Go ahead. Let up easy on the clutch." His dentures click as his breath tickles the fuzz on her ears. "And give her gas at the same time." continue

Vegas   by Andrew Coburn
Manning did miserably at blackjack. When he hit, he busted; when he stayed, the dealer, a man void of charm and humor, bested him. He played a final hand, lost, and rose indifferently. A woman watching from the crowded sidelines sized him up as an academic because of the quiet of his face, the calm sweep of hair across his forehead, and the sturdy soles of his shoes. continue

Creative Nonfiction

Come Back With That Baby!   by Heather Underwood
To be honest, I can't believe that I have made it this far. From the first moment I held my newborn son, and still to this day as he happily gallops off to preschool, I have felt like a total impostor to the parenting realm. "Surely they will stop me here," I thought, as I trudged through the hospital lobby, loaded up like an exhausted, grungy pack mule hauling both baby and baby paraphernalia from every limb, a few days after my son, Hunter's, birth. "Can't they tell that I have no earthly idea what I am doing?" I thought, glancing around from time to time, honestly expecting a nurse with a clipboard to tap me on the shoulder and retrieve the child I had just stolen. At that point I am not sure whether I would have been distraught, relieved, or something else totally off the emotional scale, but luckily, or unluckily, depending on your viewpoint, I managed to cross the borders into my car without being halted by any loud security alarms or burly police officers. continue

Poetry

dream fatigue   by Janet Butler
a complicated participation they are, dreams,
giving, however, a certain emancipation
from cause and effect, continue

Gone   by Janet Butler
Leaves fall to burst in momentary brilliance
reds and golds that dry
to scrappy tones of brown
lifted by winds
in swirls of desolation
before disintegration
and death. continue

Equinox   by Katherine L. Holmes
The emotional equinox when the saunter
on the seaside promenade
is insubstantial continue

Portent   by Katherine L. Holmes
incommoded
 reveries on the sill chilled
    whirl's eye
 shedded yanked-out cloud-fur
 fall's balding      yowling
 flakes are pallbearing leaves continue

Full Scottish Breakfast   by Graham Fulton
On a useless morning
pudding is cooking
egg is scrambling
nearby
I think continue

Life Story   by Doug Ramspeck
For a long time he imagined something murmuring
from the woods beyond the river, down amid
the black tupelos and possumhaw, hiding in the strange
alluvial richness of the bottomlands-the sagging smells,
the parasitic Spanish moss. And what was whispered continue

Relenting   by Doug Ramspeck
The acolyte sits at the kitchen table,
bathed in bright fluorescent light. He is waiting
for another explanation. Or perhaps
he is sleeping once more on the forest floor: continue

Eucharist   by Steven Schroeder
Stopped at the Donut Shop in Hamilton
for a cinnamon roll, a little Texas
small talk, theology with the Baptist
preacher who runs the place. Got to continue

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