Susan switched off the radio and thought for a minute. Did I really hear that? Right after the Hoyt Axton song? Did I really just hear them say the Russians fired a missile into space? In the dimly lit kitchen that night Gran asked Daddy what it could mean. There was a worried look on …
Author Archives: Gary L. Gehman
Rare Bird
A boy walks into a room and crosses to a desk with five open books and a lithograph of a carriage house in a rural county near Nice. Outside the window hang the branches of poplars old beyond remembering. On a bench sits a girl, engrossed in one of the books: a collection of melodic …
Counter Seen
Jerry sitting. Wipe the sweat from his brow. Maria in her colorform apron wipes some sticky residue from the worn formica countertop. Steam rises as the Bunn-O-Matic steeps its 60,000th cup of joe and its frayed cord will not catch fire yet. Jerry watches. Maria bends. Lean haunch, bovine demeanor. Insider her somewhere—perhaps in the …
4-Color Centerfold
Notes from Soviet Dissident Ivan de Tourmaline Kabral
At first there’s a wrenching crack And they bring you to with smelling salts. Your eyes refuse to focus so as not to see the horrors in that interrogation chamber. But you’re aware of them all the same. And they pull at the wires that they’ve implanted under your skin and you tell them anything. …
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Laundromat Scene
“Here, he turns down the page and brushes sandy hair over well worn eyes. Two other people are definitely watching him. Oh, sure, they look like they’re only interested in his dryer, but that’s, after all, what they’re supposed to look like!” In the hollow echoing of a corrugated cylinder, spinning endlessly round and round, …
No Mere Random Images
Just when you were finding out the chord changes to “Birdland.” Just when the orange meridian split the sky open like some great beetle spreading her wings to fly. You turn opalescent eyes up onto her glittering underplates and see there a crimson hourglass. Your life and others tumbles out of control in a formless …
Quality Control:
on Close Inspection “Nup. Don’ think she’s cracked, do you Bill?” “Well, N’ifya look here; right here along the edge…” ” — Ahh — ” “There she is.” “Shoot. I ran right past it.” “Anybody’d miss a little thang like that, Job.” “Mebbe. But what’d’a happened if that’d gone through?” “Not much, I think. Prolly …
Opus 64
(a black & white gnovel for film) Wehrmacht refugees struggle out from gloom. Step from the desert into Las Vegas Game Show. Flip into numbers and cross time as compucard data in bubble memories. Information transfer and retrieval. Home viewer (nuclear unit head) enters desired program. Pushes PLAY. Hendrix at Monterey Pop. Stutterframe transition to …
Beat Poetry
by Jack Motivations come and go like waves, washing me lifeless and breathless over the rocks; over and back again. In the deepest recess of memory I have an inkling of light. A suggestion, or a hint, of love. Little else. Once, when I was riding across New Mexico, I had an illumination: Satori. And …