A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Part 6

Certainly, I am not the center of this night that has started with a party and ended with a ruined towel. Looking at the blue-black sky, it seems it's n.o.body's birthday, though we have sung earlier, we have howled while the candles burned their broken flames. Thus the night is doubled, tripled, more voices than bodies, the sky more blue than black.

When I close my eyes, it is not to make a wish, but to forget the cups thrown from the window onto the lawn. The paper cups are not the center of this night, though for a moment they threaten to be. The summer yard-that deep, that strong-is its own character in this story where my cousin's second and third fingers have been lost quick and clean and she stands without pain at the driveway. Everyone else who ever matters is standing there, too: Mama in a dress two sizes too big; Daddy like a dark, stormy block of wood; my sisters who will end up making the prettiest brides and my brother already with his dreams of big money.

Losses and small parties-all of this happens in the two seconds of my growing up. On the porch or at the screen door, I am standing half-woman in the dark. Standing all-woman in the dark is not much different.

Frog Boy.

Rocky Davis is all hands and eyes. Big hands-state of Texas hands. Shoulders broad enough to suggest his first good sport coat. He is already wearing size 10 men's shoes, and since last Thursday, Rocky has been on fire. It started as a hot, hopeless weight in his chest and then suddenly blew wide open, his hair smoldering, his arms and face so flushed that twice his father, Wade, gently reaches over to him, puts a cool square hand on his son's shoulder, and tells Rocky to go shower.

"Christ, the kid just can't stand this heat," Wade says, shaking his head. Rocky is his best son, his only son, the big sleepy kid who doesn't look a thing like him.

It is late August in Tucson and each day the temperature slowly bulldozes upward to 107 or 108. Everywhere in the city, people have lost their patience for summer, for the flies littering windowsills like shiny black tacks, for the steaming sidewalks, and the small patchy Bermuda lawns turned brown, the gardenia and palm leaves limp as day-old sandwich makings. Some of the small restaurants have even closed for the month and put signs in their windows: Too hot to cook.

Rocky just stands there a few moments, as if his father's words take that long to unspiral and plant themselves. Finally, he heads for the shower, taking his time, dragging those Texas hands of his along the dresser until they encounter his father's credit card there. One flick of his wrist and the shiny red plastic is gone.

Rocky doesn't like being told what to do. He'd rather choose. He'd rather live in a free universe, he says.

"Rocko, my boy," his father tells him, "this is about as free as it gets."

Wade resumes eating his Baby Ruth, which is breakfast that morning. Three fingers on his right hand wear the delicate brown signature of chocolate, until he licks them and begins to look for the opened sack of Cheetos which he knows is somewhere nearby, and probably under some clothes there's a minibag of Oreos. Usually Rocky and his father don't eat like this, but they're on vacation and whatever rules composed their former life in Denver have been erased.

In the big white tiled bathroom of the El Conquistador Hotel where they are staying, under a stinging spray of water, Rocky stands still and counts to three hundred, which is longer than he has ever stayed in a shower before. It's dangerous in there, he thinks-a bad place to be in an earthquake, the plumbing folding permanently up around him like a tiled coffin.

Steam billows around him and the plastic shower curtain rustles in a warm synthetic breeze. He crosses his arms and buries his hands in the smooth, slick pockets of his armpits. He tucks his head and lets the water pour down over him-a rain, a flood taking off his first skin and leaving him the raw thirteen-year-old that he is: long thin legs interrupted by knees the size of salad plates and, recently, tufts of dark jungled hair down there.

He knows beyond a doubt, there in the shower with his hands safely put away, that he loves her: Ellen Castillo-his father's girlfriend-the woman in the adjoining hotel room who has touring maps of Tucson spread around her, blue X's marking the sites that they will probably visit: the air museum, the desert zoo, the mission. A tortilla factory. A designer underwear outlet.

Rocky doesn't care where they go as long as it's with her. Africa. Iceland. He and his father were backpacking in the rainy mountains of Tennessee two years ago and he thinks he could probably even stand that again, if she were there, despite the grenade-sized mosquitoes and the sloppy one-pot meals cooked over a campfire.

In a few minutes, his father is there knocking on the bathroom door, telling him that they're waiting. "Hey, buddy, let's get going," he says.

Wade Davis's voice dulls as it pa.s.ses through the door and into the steam where Rocky, now standing with a soft white towel around him, hears only a low frequency disturbance-a bug, a bee, something mildly whining out there on the landscape of the tan carpet. He reaches for his T-shirt and shorts and smells them before he dresses: wind, fading fabric softener, and the steely edge of that morning's earlier sweat-the second since he has awakened.

Last year in August on their annual vacation they had flown to Seattle where he didn't sweat at all, he and his father and Eve Resnick-the woman back then, someone who had insisted on high heels, though she couldn't walk in them. She teetered down Pike Street. Packed into Spandex pedal pushers, she wobbled up the long sidewalk leading to the s.p.a.ce Needle. Rocky looked the other way or tried to make it seem he was with another family. He crowded up behind two dark beanpole brothers, hoping to make it look like three. Down on the wooden wharf, as a rusted tugboat pulled up to dock, Eve had finally caught a heel and fallen, and for the rest of the trip she wore scabbed-over knees and consoled herself with tall gin and tonics. Mai tais. Red table wine.

Rocky notices that Ellen Castillo wears blue tennis shoes or sandals with lots of tiny straps across the toes. On the first day of their vacation, which was last Thursday, at a Denny's where they were eating lunch, Rocky discovered Ellen's feet, and the match was lit; the fire in him began, though his understanding of that fire was elementary still: heat, dizziness, a pulse hammering in his ears-he was not even sure it was his own. Back in Denver, he had only briefly seen Ellen, but now, in the long sunblasted days of what seemed like the other side of the world, he was getting to know her, or at least beginning to become attuned to her every move.

That day at Denny's, wayward and without cares and lugging big tote bags, they all ordered just what their hearts told them. Wade ordered a shrimp c.o.c.ktail and a hot brownie sundae, which he intended to eat in reverse order. Ellen ordered the peach melba plate. Rocky opted for just an order of French fries, but when they finally arrived he found that he had no appet.i.te. Food seemed boring, a waste of time when Ellen was sitting there in what smelled like a cloud of orange or sweet lemon.

"Gotta keep your strength up on this trip," Wade reminded his son when he saw him fidgeting and the fries untouched. "We're going to be in high gear," he said. "We're going to be seeing everything there is to see in this town."

Wade arrives in a new place-Tucson, Tennessee, wherever-with all the spirit of an invading general. He carries guidebooks and maps and has a hit list of places to definitely see. For months before his vacation, he falls asleep on the sofa each night with a Fodor's travel book opened on his chest, and it is as if, during those naps, he absorbs the intricacies of a given place-falls in love with the names of unseen streets and rivers and mountains.

During lunch at Denny's, Ellen had her legs crossed, her right foot sticking out from under the table. Rocky had never really noticed a foot before, let alone fallen in love with one. Her painted toenails made him feel inexplainably happy. Across each, she had pasted a glittery gold zig-zag so that every toe ended in a tiny bolt of lightning. A sizzle. A pop. He noticed that her foot was clean and tanned, that her toes curled or pointed up when she laughed or leaned forward to make some teasing remark to Wade. The arch was high and white, a secret place. Her small bare ankle bone pushing up under the skin made him sigh, which in turn caused Wade and Ellen to look up from their plates at him.

"What?" his father asked him.

Uncomfortable, Rocky shrugged and scratched his ear.

In what seemed like a minute to Rocky, Ellen's melba plate was gone and there was only a smoky green lettuce leaf left on the thick white china. She looked at her watch and tapped its face. "Hey guys," she said, "are we going to spend all day eating lunch?"

While she waited for Wade and Rocky to finish, she reached up and behind her and examined a heavy woven valance hanging in the window. Ellen is a drapery consultant and says she is in love with the feel of things-burlap, sateen, canvas. A good brocade makes her dizzy. Silk-good silk-she says you won't find in this country. Wherever they go, she has her hand out in front of her and opened, like a blind person who is searching a path, but instead she is registering the thread weight and gauge of chairs and curtains, anything covered in fabric that comes her way.

Rocky is not at the point where he can actually look at Ellen's face and listen to her. Looking at the door to the Denny's rest room, however, was safe. Looking out the window was momentarily calming. The windows were tinted, but even so, he had never seen sunlight that savage.

When the three of them were almost out the restaurant door, Rocky had a flash, did a quick backtrack to their table, snagged the lettuce leaf from Ellen's plate, and put it in his pocket.

In a sky-blue rented Mustang with the top down, Rocky's father drives faster than he probably should. Rocky sees cactus and palo verde zip by, long adobe walls, and the vast brown plate of the desert. In the wind that hits his face and batters his hair, he smells sun and exhaust and the brown coyote smell of dirt. He can't see the speedometer from where he's sitting in the back seat-slumped in the left corner, sitting on one crushed leg, leaning into the plush upholstery for strength.

In the front seat, Wade has placed one hand casually on Ellen's neck. Slowly his index finger moves up and down across the skin just below her ear, making a tiny but suggestive path. Rocky homes in on the hand and can't let go. His shoulders tighten and he can clearly taste the spicy composition of last night's food.

The three of them are headed for a movie set west of Tucson. Wade leans his head to the right and half-yells back at Rocky. "Isn't this great? Getting to see a movie being made and everything?"

Ellen swivels toward the stick shift. "Yeah," she says into the wind. "We're just too lucky, aren't we?"

Rocky can't quite make out what either of them is saying. It's not just the speed and rushing air that distort their voices, but the fact that Rocky's ears are half-plugged. He sees their mouths move. He hears a droning. Every few seconds, an understandable word flies, comet-like, at him: "everything," "lucky." Like a foreigner, he scrambles to patch together the conversation.

For the first time in his whole life, his father's hand bothers Rocky, actually repulses him. Up until now, it has mostly been a good hand-generous, caring, luminous in the dark. Now, it seems to Rocky, the knuckles are too big; the nails, squared-off and thick and almost yellow. He wishes Ellen would say something about it, would complain that the hand is too hot and heavy, would squirm in her bucket seat until she cast his father off and he had two hands on the steering wheel again. Rocky thinks that for once his father should be concerned with safety.

About ten miles out of town where a graveled road takes off from the highway, Wade makes the turn to the movie set a little too sharp and the three of them lurch toward the right. Ellen and Wade laugh as if a car and a roller coaster are supposed to have something in common. Rocky, irritated, hunkers down lower in his corner, trying to keep from sliding across the seat.

When the car finally stops in the dusty parking lot and Rocky tries to stand, he finds that the folded leg he has sat on is numb. Ellen and Wade hurry across the dirt lot and into a huge, abandoned machine shop where the movie is being made. Rocky follows more slowly, slightly limping, trying to shake the pins and needles loose.

The film is not yet t.i.tled. In it, an alien of unknown origin-masterminded by two special effects men-confronts a woman at an old rundown desert motel. On the set, there's a bright pink neon sign rigged up-Tumble Inn-buzzing and half-lit. Portable lights are set up everywhere, creating a sharp blue-white halo that appears thick as cigarette smoke. A man wearing a cap with horns sprouting out the sides is being raised up above the set on a noisy black crane. He is obviously unhappy-yelling and pointing and shaking his head. "f.u.c.k you, Louie, just f.u.c.k you," he hollers from about twelve feet up.

Ellen can't believe how skinny the actress is. "You can't tell me that's attractive," she says quietly, standing on her toes for a better view. She turns to Wade. "Is that attractive?"

Wade shakes his head no and puts his arm around her shoulder. Ellen smiles and settles herself into the tan muscled groove of his bicep. At home in Denver, he and Rocky share a Joe Weider weight set, and Wade has been making good progress, though Rocky finds the weights boring. He'd rather lift one of the wrought-iron kitchen chairs over his head, spin it like the people from the Moscow Circus who could make a whole ladder of spinning chairs, or he'd rather see, with just one leg, how far he can push the bulky gray sofa. Besides, Rocky lately finds his muscles ungovernable. Right in the midst of flag football, for instance, or a neighborhood game of catch, a leg cramp rivets him to the ground where he clutches the gra.s.s embarra.s.singly.

At the movie set Rocky watches the show of affection between his father and Ellen-pats and rubs and long full-body presses, the quick birdlike kisses of the newly in love-and at the same time he some-how watches the filming. He can see both up and down, far left and far right. It is as if his field of vision has quadrupled. His brown eyes flick and rotate, finding both the obvious and the hidden: a star-shaped mole on a woman's neck, a hole in the sleeve of a cameraman's shirt. When Rocky can't stand it anymore-the lights, the swirling movement, the actress's face being dabbed with sponges, his father pulling Ellen closer and closer-he heads for a portable c.o.ke stand back by the entrance.

He gets in line and starts to dig in his pockets for change. His left hand comes up and in it is shredded paper, a b.u.t.ton, a few twists of lettuce and orange peel. He stares at the contents of his pocket, confused. The line keeps shortening until there is only one man in front of him. Rocky hurriedly feels for coins in his right pocket, but everything there is vague and unfamiliar, the warm dark terrain of someone else's clothes. The man in front of him is reaching up onto the counter now for a red and white paper cup. The girl selling c.o.kes brushes hair from her eyes and starts to look back in the line.

Rocky feels the pressure of the moment as a huge bubble that works its way up from the bottom of his stomach and lodges in his throat, threatening as a chicken bone. Even if he had the money resting coolly in his hand, he knows he couldn't say a word. The c.o.ke girl, tired and bored, would lean forward, waiting for his order, the mounds of her small earthy b.r.e.a.s.t.s rejoicing momentarily from the top of her halter.

Rocky slips out of line and shoulders his way to the rest room. The one sink in there has been torn inches away from the wall and a chipped green welder's tank temporarily props it up. A silvery stream of water snakes down the wall from a joint in the plumbing. Rocky pulls the water lever on and dunks his head, and when he finally straightens back up the water runs down his neck and soaks the top of his shirt. Drowns him. Saves him. In four days, he hasn't felt this good.

Wade is browsing at the souvenir stand-a wooden cart loaded with T-shirts and cactus highball gla.s.ses-and when he sees Rocky standing over by the extras, wet almost to the waist with his dark woolly hair slicked back, he stops and looks again. "Criminy," he says when he's standing at Rocky's side, "I almost didn't know you. What happened?"

Rocky doesn't know how to explain much of anything. Ellen strolls up behind Wade, and Rocky certainly doesn't know how to explain this feeling he gets when she's near: his arms and legs become weighted, his throat tightens to the width of a string. The bare blue heat intensifies between his legs. Yesterday his shoes would not stay tied in her presence, and if it had not been for the egg-frying heat of the concrete, he would have thrown them away.

Ellen looks sleepily around the movie set and says that, all in all, she's disappointed. "To tell you the truth," she says, "I'd rather go to a theater and watch a movie than see it being made."

Wade raises his hand in agreement, votes yes for Ellen.

They look at Rocky, but his answer has darted completely away from him, slippery and unreliable, and when his lips open, when he tries to coax it out, a small low-pitched belch is all he can muster.

Ellen giggles and Rocky thinks it's the sound of gla.s.s and silver and sunlight falling.

Wade rubs Rocky's head and smiles, and instantly, with a fierce and nauseating instinct he's never felt before, Rocky's hand closes tight at his side, as if he were grabbing onto and then raising a two-by-four against his father.

Just before they leave for the Sonora Desert Museum, Wade discovers his credit card gone. He hits the side of his head a couple of times like he's just come out of a swimming pool and needs to empty an ear. "Now where in the h.e.l.l would I have left that?" he asks himself. He's mad and worried, which Rocky finds a strangely satisfying combination.

Ellen starts to work their way backwards for him. "Let's see. We were in the hotel cafe for breakfast this morning. And last night. . ."

In Rocky's room, behind the swivel stand of a 21-inch color TV, back where no right-minded maid would ever clean, there is a collection of valuables. Wade's sungla.s.ses and electric razor. Now the credit card. Rocky knows that he should feel ashamed, but that's a feeling he can't get inside of and wear anymore. It's like last year's T-shirts-too small, too tight at the neck.

Wade calls and puts a stop on the credit card, and then, not to be deterred, they drive to the desert museum.

Ellen is dressed in green-green shorts, green top. If she were any more green or beautiful, Rocky knows that it would drive him mad, that he would climb the thick cyclone fence and join the pack of gray wire-haired javelinas they are watching. Actually, there's not that much to watch. The javelinas are woven among the boulders of a gray concrete wall. They are facedown in cool dirt, sleeping in deep ovals of shade.

"They've got the right idea," Ellen says.

"Yup," Rocky adds, and it's only a small word, but he soars with confidence. He feels himself smile, his back arch a little. He bites at his thumb and looks down to make sure his fly is zipped.

They move on toward the porcupines. Ellen leads the way. She carries the map and easily decides everyone's destiny. Neither he nor Ellen nor his father can find the porcupines within their enclosure. The three of them lean their faces up to the fence and scour the trees and around the rocks, but can't sight any of the dark barrel bodies.

Warm and frustrated, Wade volunteers to run for snacks, and then it's just Ellen and Rocky walking along a dirt path toward whatever animal comes next. Marsupial. Primate.

It is only midmorning, but already the air is thick and dry as rope, leaden to the taste. People stroll by in clothes that have been cut up for the weather-sleeves and legs and shirttails are raggedly cut off. Parents stop to swathe babies in sun block, then turn and dot each other's shoulders.

Rocky wears a black and white striped legionnaire's hat that his father bought for him the day before in a surfers shop. "Keep the sun off your head," he told Rocky, and for a while Rocky was irked-more instructions-but actually Rocky likes the way the long flaps off the back of the hat flutter against his neck.

He looks up and the cloud-streaked sky is bone pale and beneath it Ellen's hair is streaming with sunlight and the sweet powdery smell of shampoo. She turns the map sideways and reads the fine print that details the petting zoo. Rocky is engrossed with her every move. It seems that he is seeing the small, everyday movements of a human for the first time. She pushes her sungla.s.ses up onto her hair and then squints at the map. She c.o.c.ks her head to the right and studies.

Then, in the distance where a group of s.h.a.ggy cigar-colored camels are bunched together, Rocky spots his father holding a big cardboard snack tray, and he makes a split-second decision. He guides Ellen to the right, just nudges with his shoulder, and amazingly she doesn't even look up from the map. She veers softly right, and they weave strategically among other zoo-goers, then head toward the big cats and the elephant. Rocky doesn't remember what all they see on this loop, but Ellen reads to him and points and makes the morning alive. His skin crackles. His heart tentatively climbs back into his chest where it rustles and whirrs.

Rocky doesn't wear a watch, so he doesn't know how long it is before Wade, sweaty and winded, finally meets up with them in the Reptile House. The ice in the drinks that Wade is carrying has completely melted. Cheese nachos tumble one by one off the cardboard tray and the orangey topping oozes over his thumb.

"Hey, Rocko," he says, "didn't you see me back there? Where in the heck have you guys been?"

"Everywhere," Ellen says, waving the map. "Give me a c.o.ke. I'm dying."

There is a strong sour odor in the Reptile House and the first thing Rocky does is drop back from Wade and Ellen, lift his arm, and smell to see if it's him. Rocky doesn't know what to expect out of himself anymore-what strange pink appendages might protrude, what swampy smell might emanate. When he checks out all right, he lowers his arm and hurries ahead.

Ellen practically has her face against the gla.s.s of a chamber where a long bright-green snake is wrapped next to an almost perfect replica of itself-a dark recently shed skin. She puts her finger against the gla.s.s and taps lightly. The snake is frozen and only the thread of its tongue flicks the stagnant air. Rocky doesn't like watching the snake. He chooses a bark-skinned lizard in a tree doing what looks like pushups. Wade shakes his head and moves toward the exit. He says he has a bad case of heebie-jeebies.

That's the way that Rocky ends up alone with Ellen in the Reptile House, going from gla.s.s to gla.s.s, hardly breathing at all, staying the whole time within a foot of her shoulder.

There are huge propeller-sized fans blowing everywhere around the tortilla factory. The deep, sorrowful smell of grease spreads through the whirring air of the fans, though Josephina, the factory tour guide and a former masa-maker herself, does not refer to it as grease. "Shortening," she says, her accent hardening the t and n's, making the word sound like some exotic ingredient. All of the workers wear nets on their heads, spidery black webs that flatten their hair similarly. The edges of their oversized white cotton ap.r.o.ns wave slightly from the fans, and to Rocky these people look like ghosts as they stand solemnly here or there to catch a breeze.

Ellen must feel the tortillas, of course. Josephina says yes, by all means. Ellen picks one up and holds the soft gold and brown specked treasure up to the light and it becomes a round opaque window. Soon there is flour on her fingertips and a white iridescent smudge on her face. Wade walks up to her, licks his finger, and rubs it over the spot on her cheek. In an instant Rocky knows how it feels to have his chest crushed, though he realizes it isn't much of a chest yet-bony, hairless, white.

Rocky pushes ahead to the sales office where the tour will end. He sits in a brown molded plastic chair and stews while he waits for the rest of the group. With one foot, he kicks the sole of his other shoe until that foot throbs, but it is a disconnected pain-just a steady chain of blips on a machine somewhere.

The tour group arrives sampling bits of rolled tortillas, powdered sugar and honey on their hands. Wade saves some for Rocky, but he doesn't want any. He shakes his head and moves next to the air-conditioning unit set in the wall. The icy air pours over his arm and even whispers to him.

Wade wants one evening alone in Tucson with Ellen. "You don't mind, do you, Rocko?" his father asks him when they're back at the hotel. Wade has stopped and bought himself a disposable razor; he thinks his electric razor will show up when they have more time to look. He is at the mirror, already shaving for the evening. He flicks white lather into the sink and stretches his mouth to one side for a clear smooth run of the razor. He wants to take Ellen somewhere special to eat, he says. "What do you think?" he asks Rocky. "Seafood or French?"

Wade splashes after-shave on his face and the sweet layers of pine hit Rocky like a gut punch. "French," he tells his father, not even really knowing the word in that moment or why he says it.

As Wade and Ellen hurry to get ready, Rocky glides once through their room, and the car keys are there on the nightstand waiting for him-flashing, metallic, calling to him in the way that jewelry or a lighter calls to the solitary shoplifter. When he drops the keys quietly into his pocket, he feels nothing. He tells his father and Ellen he's going to his room to look at TV.

Instead, he goes down the elevator and out the side door of the hotel. He walks down the sidewalk and feels his skin shrinking, the keys pressing his leg each time he moves. The sun will dip behind the long, purple belt of mountains soon, though it is still unbearably hot outside. A group of older women in stretchy floral swimming suits at a nearby c.o.c.ktail table wave bright Chinese fans before their faces, which send their blue-gray hair fluttering.

No real plan opens itself to Rocky. Instead, it is the dense oleanders and privets decorating the outside wall of the hotel that open to him-a large shadowy parting between branches. He bends quickly and crawls forward. Close to the ground and with the greenery shrouding him, he is surprised at how comfortable and right this place feels. The leaves turn to him and kindle tiny bursts of the last bits of sunlight. Slowly, the noise of the bushes takes over-the locusts, the lizards, the low pulsing of sap. Rocky stretches out and rubs his cheek in the cool soothing dirt. One of his hands closes over damp leaves and the other takes hold of a ball of dried roots.

Finally, in the thin mauve twilight, out on the sidewalk that stretches big as a runway from where he is hidden, Rocky spots his father's shoes-a worried pair of white canvas topsiders pacing back and forth, then halting, then moving into the gra.s.s.

Rocky reaches down and checks to see that the keys are still in his pocket, curls up, tucks a foot under the opposite thigh, then closes his eyes. He listens to his name being called again and again-a frantic singsong message that drifts away toward the pool and then farther: to rocks and weeds and moonlight and beyond-but in the darkness of a summer's night, there is no boy left to answer.

The Flannery O'Connao Award For Shaort Fiction.

David Walton, Evening Out.

Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up.

Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups.

Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight.

Mary Hood, How Far She Went Francois Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women Molly Giles, Rough Translations Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts Antonya Nelson, The Expendables Nancy Zafris, The People I Know Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Christopher Mcllroy All My Relations Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer C. M. Mayo, Shy over El Nido Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag Andy Plattner, Winter Money Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory Mary Clyde, Survival Rates Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees Robert Anderson, Ice Age Bill Roorbach, Big Bend Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall Kellie Wells, Compression Scars Eric Shade, Eyesores Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl David Crouse, Copy Cats Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Greg Downs, Spit Baths Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism Anne Panning, Super America.

Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement.

Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter.

Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons.

Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis.

Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World.

Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots.

Jessica Treadway Please Come Back to Me.

Amina Gautier, At-Risk.

Melinda Moustakis, Bear Down, Bear North.