Month: September 2019

Waiting For A “No”

We discourage simultaneous submissions. – The Sun literary magazine (and others)

Given acceptance rates and reading periods, it would take the average writer 250-500 years to publish a piece using exclusive submissions. – Erika Krouse, writer, from her website, http://www.erikakrousewriter.com


Dear Mr. Blankenship,

Thank you for allowing us the privilege of considering the short story, “Now or Never”, for publication by 26th Century Review. After careful consideration, we have decided that this piece is not a good fit for our readers.

But don’t give up! We’re certain your great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather would not want you to! It would have been like totally exhausting for him to think of all those words!

While the story still resonates even after the Big Nuclear Misunderstanding of 2038, the Great Florida Submersion, the disappearance of the world’s lakes and rivers, Holocausts II-V, and the brutal repression, resurgence, and re-repression of science, we feel that the style is too early-third-millennium, though its language is remarkably authentic. Its many “words” and “phrases”, not to mention “complete sentences”, will confuse most of today’s readers, or possibly all three of them.

A professional editor can help you remove obstructive adjectives, adverbs and minor plot lines to create a more immediate literary micro-experience.  We encourage you to re-submit this story after making these improvements. If you’re no longer around, we look forward to hearing from your descendants!

Sncrly, the eds.

Texas, Our Texas! the Scary, Stupid State!

Steve Eaton, September 2, 2019

The Garden of Eaton is located here in the Great State of Texas, somewhere between Falfurrias and Pflugerville. And we love our Texas (meaning that we love its people, our neighbors) despite the fact that it has got to be the scariest and stupidest state in the Union.

Scary, because as horrible recent events demonstrate, you can’t go to the mall, or attend high school, or go to church, or drive down the highway without the very real possibility of taking a bullet. You see, down here in Texas, anyone with a fragile ego and dodgy mental health who’s been dumped by their wife or girlfriend (Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church, 26 dead, 20 wounded), or who has racist fantasies (El Paso Wal-Mart, 22 dead, 24 wounded), or who has been bullied in school (Santa Fe, Texas High School, 10 dead, 13 wounded), or who has just been fired for acting a little nutso on the job (Midland/Odessa highway, 8 dead, 24 wounded) is free to load up on semiautomatic assault rifles, pistols, and shotguns and as much ammo as they can carry, and go human-hunting to their sick little heart’s content. And goodness knows we have no end of racists, dumped boyfriends, bullied high school students, and fired employees, and no end of guns and ammo down here in the Lone Star State. At least I’m not worried about climate change anymore. I’m too worried about making it home from the grocery store. And more importantly, about the little kids next door making it home from school.

Stupid, because the people with any power to do anything to start mitigating the problem evidently lack the imagination and/or the desire to do anything except make guns and ammo more easily accessible. In fact, new laws making guns easier to get and harder to restrict were adopted the day after the Midland/Odessa massacre. Stupid, because the politicians who enacted those laws were freely elected by us, the people of Texas. (Though to be clear, “us” in this case does not actually include me.) Stupid, because we live in a state where gun store shelves were emptied of weapons and ammo by panicked buyers after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election. Stupid, because our gun freaks love to parade around the state house carrying M16 rifles and flags picturing a cannon with the words daring some phantom enemy to “come and take it”. Stupid, because when the NRA paints any common-sense gun law as a threat to personal liberty and as a slippery slope that will end in outright gun confiscation, we simply believe them.

How’s this for stupid? One of the new laws means that landlords cannot prohibit their tenants from keeping guns on their rental properties.

Now, we have lived in Texas, on and off, since 1966, including many long stretches in apartments and rented homes. And we know, through press reports and personal experience, that there are many stupid reasons that a landlord will not rent to you. It may be because you are African-American, or Asian, or a full-time student. Or because you cannot prove that you make as much money as your would (not)-be landlord would like.

But we have never, ever heard of a landlord interested in even knowing whether a tenant owned a gun.

But, theoretically, I suppose it could happen. So now there is a happy Texas state legislator who can go back to his or her district at election time and proudly proclaim that they protected their constituency from those evil hordes of socialist intellectual big-government landlords who wouldn’t let them keep a Kalashnikov in the closet.

And our governor has defended these new laws as keeping communities safer.

It would all be very funny if it weren’t for actual blood pooling in the aisles of the church, the classrooms, the Wal-Mart, the highway. It would be hilarious if it were not for the two-month old baby boy in El Paso who will now grow up an orphan. It would be a riot if it were not for the 17-month baby girl now in a hospital after being shot in Midland-Odessa.

I predict our governor will mumble some hypocritical nonsense about helping those with mental health issues – hypocritical, because he manages a state that, according to two independent rankings, sits about 40th in the nation in mental health services, a state whose government has shown a lot of enthusiasm in not spending public money on health services. And hypocritical also because mental health care and gun control are not mutually exclusive, as Abbott well knows.  

And Texas will remain a beautiful but scary and stupid place to live and raise a family in.

In Praise of the Live Performance

I was having a cup of coffee with my dad, and we were talking about theater, and he asked me what my favorite play was. Turned out to be a tough question, because, when thinking about the plays I have seen, and which one I liked best, I realized that the experience of watching a live performance often meant more to me than the play itself. Let me give you an example:

When I was fifteen or sixteen, my aunt took me to see a production of the play Equus as performed by the Skokie Illinois Community Theater. If you’ve never heard about or seen Equus, well, it was huge in the seventies. The play is about a psychiatrist who is treating a young man, Alan Strang, who has committed a horrible and inexplicable crime—the blinding of six horses with a metal spike. There is a critical scene in Equus where a young woman, Jill Mason, attempts to seduce Alan in the stables where they both work. Alan, who, for complicated reasons, feels he is being watched and judged by the horses, is unable to get an erection. In the play as written, the actors are to perform this scene in the nude.

I imagine most community theaters would find a way to fig-leaf that particular scene—not the Skokie Community Theater—they went for the “full Monty”. That’s pretty gutsy, for a community theater, I think, and kudos to them. Unfortunately, they ran into a little snag. The actor portraying Alan had exactly the opposite problem that Alan has in the play. Let me not fig-leaf the situation: he had a raging hard-on.

The show must go on, as they say, but the dialog between Alan and Jill, where she tries to comfort him about his failure, was rendered rather comic.

On the way out of the theater, my aunt and I were preceded by two elderly women, and I overheard their conversation, which centered on the actor’s unfortunate difficulty in that scene. How remarkable it was, one of the women said, that he was able to keep right on going and didn’t miss a line.

“He was so brave!” the other said.

So is Equus my favorite play? Oy. There are so many better plays. And yet, perhaps the best line I ever heard in a theater was one delivered by a sympathetic elderly lady after the curtain dropped.

Every live performance is two stories in one: the story told in the script, and the story of the people midwifing that script to life right before your very eyes. A rich, strange world is born in that intersection.

I could tell you about the time I went to see “Goose and Tomtom” at the Undermain Theater in Dallas, Texas, and got to walk around in a monster alien’s shoes, or the time I was on a first date with the woman I would marry, and I took her to see “The Castle”—but those are stories for another time—let’s just say that when people go out on stage and give it their all, magic can happen.

I hope you are thinking to yourself now, “I haven’t been to see a play in a long time—maybe I should go.” Yes, you should—but let me give you a suggestion. Don’t go to the big theater in town where they do slick productions of the most popular plays of this and yester year. Find a small, hardworking theater group that is doing something dicey. If you’re going to go see a live performance, go see one that will surprise you.

So go. Be brave.