I have pretty much read the Fall 2005 issue of Ploughshares from cover to cover now. It is an excellent issues, guest edited by Antonya Nelson.

My favorite stories in the issue all, in a way, deal with family, with coming of age (even if one is middle aged), with love or the lack thereof, and with desire–a need for something that is missing. They are–Just Family, Cowboy Honeymoon, Inkneck, The Bottom of the Glass, and the luminous, hilarious, and horrific If There’s a Hell I Hope You Burn There with the Others:

The last picture I take is of Rachel, stumbling through the double doors under the basketball goal, wiping white spit from her mouth. I ask her what’s wrong, and she asks me if I have ever seen one of my close friends eaten alive. I tell her that I have not, and I put my camera in the cardboard box with the others. I imagine my father and Angie sitting around the kitchen table organizing the photos. I wonder if Angie will cry when she finds out that seventy percent of her wedding pictures are of bloody fish. I wonder which of my pictures will make it to the album and which ones she will throw away.