The Spring 2016 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Spring 2016 issue of the Apple Valley Review features an essay by Colin Pope; short fiction by Martha Clarkson, Sarah Wolf, Denise Tolan, and Knud Sørensen; a prose poem by Michael Chin; poetry by Gayane M. Haroutyunyan, Carmen Firan, Laura Lee Washburn, Kevin McLellan, Domenic Scopa, Virginia Barrett, Gail Peck, and K. J. Knoespel; and cover artwork by Thomas Cole.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal.  The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Short fiction by Yoko Ogawa, an essay by D. T. Max, and more

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A waiter led us into a private room at the back of the restaurant, where the man was already seated at a table too large for three, sipping a garish red cocktail.  For some reason I had assumed he would be accompanied by a secretary or bodyguard, but he was alone.
        A chandelier hung from the ceiling and flowers had been arranged around the room.  The silverware gleamed, the tablecloth was blindingly white. 
        They barely greeted each other, exchanging little more than vague, meaningless grunts.  She sat down without introducing me, and I realized the moment for such formalities had already passed.  
--From "Fruit Juice," a short story by Yoko Ogawa, published in her collection of interconnected stories, Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (Picador, 1998).

Darek Fidyka, who is forty-one years old, . . . was born and raised in Pradzew, a small farming town in central Poland, not far from Lodz.  At 3 A.M. on July 27, 2010, Fidyka and his girlfriend, Justyna, woke to the sound of someone smashing Fidyka's Volkswagen outside their house, a few miles from Pradzew.  They got out of bed, rushed out the door, and found her ex-husband, Jaroslaw, battering the car with a cinder block.
--From "One Small Step: A paraplegic undergoes pioneering surgery," an essay by D. T. Max, The New Yorker (January 25, 2016), pp. 48-57.

beside myself in Texas the doctors asking my beloved
to give his pain a number one to ten his answer is always
two I tell them eight the holly bush in the yard is putting out new leaves... 
--From "Chameleon," a poem by Ellen Bryant Voigt, The New Yorker (May 7, 2012), p. 34.

Weird Pig told the mule to send him email.  Send the real kind, he said.  All right?
        The mule was at a loss.  He had heard of email and mail, but mules were prohibited by law from sending or receiving either one.  He wasn't sure exactly what they were.
        Weird Pig didn't know what email was either, but he had overheard Farmer Dan talking about it with one of the chickens.  He thought he should let on to someone that he knew what it was.  It might improve his status on the farm.
--From "Real Mail," a short story by Robert Long Foreman, The Collapsar (January 15, 2016).

Boy 2 rescued you on the playground.  There was a kid who always showed up dressed like a cowboy, who one day climbed the ladder just behind you, put his lasso around your neck, and pushed you down the slide.  Boy 2 ran over to see if you were hurt--you weren't, just shocked by the sudden viciousness of it--and to shout at the other boy, "Leave her alone!"  He stood over you while you loosened the rope and helped you pull the noose off over your head.  
--From "An Inventory," a short story by Joan Wickersham, One Story, Volume 12, Number 8 (October 27, 2014).

Fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Yasunari Kawabata, and Louise Erdrich

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This is what happened.  An unmarried woman in her thirties implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover.  
        This so-called lover bounced between two households, his mother's and his wife's, and he had an overripe daughter of fourteen to consider as well.  About his work at the laboratory he constantly fretted but would brag to anyone who listened about the imminent promotion that never materialized.  The insatiable appetite he displayed at office parties, where he stuffed himself, was the result of an undiagnosed diabetes that enslaved him to thirst and hunger and lacquered him with pasty skin, thick glasses, and dandruff.  A fat, balding man-child of forty-two with a dead-end job and ruined health--this was the treasure our unmarried thirtysomething brought to her apartment for a night of love. . . . 
--From There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, a collection by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, selected and translated from the Russian by Anna Summers (Penguin Books, 2013).

Even when he reached Kamakura and the Engakuji Temple, Kikuji did not know whether or not he would go to the tea ceremony.  He was already late.
        He received an announcement whenever Kurimoto Chikako offered tea at the inner cottage of the Engakuji.  He had not once gone since his father's death, however.  He thought of the announcements as no more than formal gestures in memory of his father.  
        This time there had been a postscript: she wanted him to meet a young lady to whom she was giving tea lessons.
        As he read it, Kikuji thought of Chikako's birthmark.  
        Had he been eight, perhaps, or nine?  He had been taken by his father to visit Chikako, and they had found her in the breakfast room. . . . 
--From Thousand Cranes, a short novel by Yasunari Kawabata, originally published in Japanese as Sembazuru, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker, with drawings by Fumi Komatsu (Wideview/Perigee, G. P. Putnam's Sons/The Putnam Publishing Group, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1959).

He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents.  With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked.  Nero, a mixture of fierce breeds in a line known locally as guard dogs, was valued for his strength, his formidable jaws, and his resonant bark.  At night, he was turned loose to guard the cash register in the front of the shop, where he paced the waxed linoleum, a ghostly white.  Other unbanked valuables were kept in a safe in my grandfather's bedroom.  He slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side of him and a loaded gun on the other.  This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water. . . .   
--From "Nero," a short story by Louise Erdrich, The New Yorker (May 7, 2012), pp. 60-67.

"Turning" by W. S. Merwin

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Going too fast for myself I missed 
more than I think I can remember

almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back . . .  

--From "Turning," a poem by W. S. Merwin, The New Yorker (May 16, 2011), p. 49.

Four poems and two short stories

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The daughter wakes to a world
encased in ice--
the pine trees stiff with it.
--From "Still," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke, from her collection Once (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 85-87.

It is a green landscape, houses stalwart
as circus ponies, American houses, wet
kids moving through them in Spandex bathing suits; 
inside, sandwiches with crusts cut off, 
windows flung open and striped awnings rolled out; 
family portraits on the walls and generic
medicines in the cabinet: the middle classes.
--From "Twenty-first Century Fireworks," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke, first published in The Kenyon Review and reprinted in her collection Once (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 17-18.

Who will remember us
when the light breaks
over the western valley 

and the trash stirs, 
the flood having come
with its red waters

and washed our graves away?
I was a person, 

once, I believe. . . .
--From "Churchyard," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke, first published in Tin House (Issue number 49, Fall 2011) and reprinted in her collection Once (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 45-46.

There was once a young wife, the apple of her husband's eye.  She was beautiful and charming and intelligent, and had been to college as well, a rare achievement for women in those days.
--From "The Maid Servant's Story," a short story by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, from her collection Arranged Marriage (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1995), pp. 109-168.

Did you folks have a quarrel, asked the policeman, looking up from his notepad with a frown, and the husband looked directly back into his eyes and said, No, of course we didn't.  
--From "The Disappearance," a short story by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, from her collection Arranged Marriage (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1995), pp. 169-181.

I am staying at a house with a screened-in back porch.  
--From "This Is Classy Because I Say So," a poem by Meg Johnson, published in Bear Review (Volume 2, Issue 1), p. 10.

Books of short stories by Roberto Bolaño and Dan Chaon, and a tragicomic illustrated memoir by Allie Brosh

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B is in love with X.  Unhappily, of course.  There was a time in his life when B would have done anything for X, as people generally say and think when they are in love.  X breaks up with him.  She breaks up with him over the phone.  
--From "Phone Calls," one of a series of connected stories by Roberto Bolaño, from his short story collection Last Evenings on Earth, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions, 2006).  "Phone Calls" first appeared in Grand Street. 

O'Sullivan and his older brother, Smokey, have been driving in silence for a long while when the deer steps out of the darkness and into the middle of the road.
     For a second, it seems as if the world is paralyzed.  They can see the deer with its hoof lifted, taking a delicate step into their path, dreamy as a sleepwalker.  They can see the enormous skeletal bouquet of antlers as it turns to face them.  
--From "Slowly We Open Our Eyes," a short story by Dan Chaon, from his story collection Stay Awake (Ballantine/Random House, 2012), pp. 172-187.

This girl I've been seeing falls out of a tree one June evening.  She's . . . a little drunk and a little belligerent. . . . and we've been arguing obliquely all evening.
     For example, I just found out that she has an ex-husband who lives in Japan, who technically isn't an ex-husband since they haven't officially divorced.
     For example, I didn't know that she thought I was a bad kisser: "Your kisses are unpleasantly moist," she says.  "Has anyone ever told you that?"
     "Actually, no," I say.  "I've always gotten compliments on my kisses." 
     "Well," she says.  "Women very rarely tell the truth." 
     I smile at her.  "You're lying," I say . . .   
--From "Shepherdess," a short story by Dan Chaon, first published in Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2006) and reprinted in his story collection Stay Awake (Ballantine/Random House, 2012), pp. 188-209.

When I was ten years old, I wrote a letter to my future self and buried it in the backyard.  Seventeen years later, I remembered that I was supposed to remember to dig it up two years earlier.  
. . .  The letter begins thusly: 

        Dear 25 year old . . .
        Do you still like dogs?  What is your favorite dog?  Do you have
        a job tranning dogs?  Is Murphy still alive?  What is youre favorite
        food??  Are mom and dad still alive?

. . .  Below [a crayon drawing of] German shepherds, I wrote the three most disturbing words in the entire letter--three words that revealed more about my tenuous grasp on reality than anything else I have uncovered about my childhood.  There, at the bottom of the letter, I had taken my crayon stub and used it to craft the following sentence: 

                                      Please write back.

--From Hyperbole and a Half, written and illustrated by Allie Brosh (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2013).

Halflife, a collection of poems by Meghan O'Rourke

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The blue square of light
in the window across the street
never goes dark--

the cathodes, the cordage, the atoms
working the hem of dusk--
traveling past the cranes and the docks

and the soiled oyster beds, 
the trees loaded with radium, 
colors like guns, 

. . . 

I came through the sodium streets
past the diners, a minister idly turning his glass, 
service stations, gas, cars sharp in the light.

How long will the light go on?
Longer than you.  Still you ought to live like a city, 
rich and fierce at the center.

--From "Halflife," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke, first published in the magazine Poetry (September 2005) and reprinted in her collection Halflife (W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), pp. 23-24.