Dispatches | Page 9 | The Common

Open Season

August 25, 2021 Dispatches

Wythe County, VA, 1985

The rifle is heavy and hard in my arms, the butt jammed up into my right shoulder, just like Lee showed me. Peering down the nose of the gun, I can see the line of targets—coffee cans, plastic milk jugs, and Coke cans—lined up like birds on a fence. The air is cool and wild, and a breeze comes across the hollow carrying the sweet smell of hay and manure. Except for the herd of grazing Holstein cattle, little black-and-white smudges against the browning pastures, Lee and I are the only living creatures visible. Me and him and the gun with real bullets.

Traffic on the FDR

August 11, 2021 Dispatches

By OLIVE AMDUR

“Places remember what people forget.”
– Richard Powers

Instead of speaking, we eat peanuts in the Holland Tunnel: the unshelled, lightly roasted kind from the bulk section of our grocery store. With one hand on the steering wheel, my father takes handfuls from the top, since all the salt falls to the bottom, and my mother digs for those. Outside, the tunnel tiles blur as our Subaru speeds beneath the river and all the buried foundations of New York.

Histories

July 28, 2021 Dispatches

By SARAH DUNPHY-LELII

Austin, Texas

I once dated a bull rider, which is very interesting, I still find. He was at the time no longer a bull rider, he had rather been one in his youth, but this lingered, as you might expect. This was in a part of the country where bull riders are not so rare as they are in the northeast, though still rare enough for people to lean forward when they hear. The only time he visited with my family we played a board game where everyone shouts out words, and would you believe a card came up “Things You Can Ride.” Even this cosmic wink could not keep together two with only the two-step in common. But the two-step itself married me to rambling dancehalls for joyful months after, a sweating Dos Equis in one hand and the other free for the taking.

A Salamander

July 14, 2021 Dispatches

By MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER

Southwest Ohio

Cute, I said bending over, a salam—
I swallowed the second half of the word

as my face drew nearer to the shiny body
and I saw the white oozing from its mouth, but

it was too late.

My daughter was already rushing over,
What is that little guy?

I stood, tried pivoting,
a bit dizzy from the way the thing

lay there still

moving one of its tiny arms, I looked at Kayla
and said in Hebrew, which we both speak thanks to

Shinjuku Golden Gai and the Midnight Diner

June 30, 2021 Dispatches

By KAORI FUJIMOTO

Shinjuku Golden Gai came to my attention during the pandemic months in Tokyo. On those quiet stay-at-home evenings, I watched the Japanese TV series “Midnight Diner” on Netflix, and the Diner’s location was set in Golden Gai, a tiny nightlife quarter that was once an illegal prostitution district in Shinjuku, a town in Tokyo, after World War II. Each self-contained half-hour episode of the show revolved around a customer who always ordered the same food at the hole-in-the-wall Diner run by “Master,” a mysterious middle-aged man with a scarred face. The Diner’s regulars, crammed at the U-shaped counter, ranged from corporate employees and detectives to strippers and gangsters. At the end of the day, these customers walked through the alleyways where electric signs of bars and restaurants jutted into the air, opened the Diner’s sliding door and said, “Master, my usual, please.” The show brought these characters a little closer to me through the foods they ordered. Octopus-shaped red weenies, bite-sized fried chicken, ground meat cutlets served with macaroni salad and finely-sliced cabbage—conventional home-style dishes I ate while growing up.

64-West & KY State Fair

June 16, 2021 Dispatches, Poetry

By D.S. WALDMAN

Kentucky, United States

64-West
After Calvino

When you ride a long time in the private
night of your pickup cab
you enter eventually
into a desire you cannot name a greater dark
that wants only what

Anticipating, Zebra Finches

June 2, 2021 Dispatches

By JOHN KINSELLA

Avon Valley, Western Australia

Just below, a roo doe digs into the softest
soil it can find — avoiding rocks — to make
a hollow for itself and the joey heavy in its pouch;
it lifts, digs, turns drops lifts digs turns drops.

The Battle of the Camel

May 19, 2021 Dispatches

By SARA ELKAMEL

Camels on the Moon, 2021, Mixed media and collage on cardboard. Artwork by Sara Elkamel.

Cairo, Egypt

When you’re not looking
I try on your big brown shoes,

pick a spot to run to, practice ducking
from winged pellets on the street—

How Living Looks

May 5, 2021 Dispatches

By ARIEL CHU

Taipei, Taiwan, December 2020

The three of us—Frances, Jay, and I—live in this rain-slick city, concrete buildings stained with runoff. At night, the streets stretch like black pools, glossy with reflected traffic lights. We stumble around half-closed night markets with our snapped umbrellas and damp socks. Our pockets weighted with bruised change, we eat charred oyster mushrooms crusted with cumin and rose salt, waiting out the rain under fluorescent storefront awnings.

Nights of a Thousand Candles

April 14, 2021 Dispatches

By EMMA AYLOR

Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina