“Finally,” would you say, the Summer edition of our magazine, is out for you to print and take with you on your vacation, wherever that may be. You will notice a few changes, more experiments from yours truly, among which the fact that all stories are exclusively in the PDF file and not directly visible online (some of you may not even notice a difference). Too many typographical subtleties were stretching the html cum wordpress mix, and I’m enamored with the Garamond font. In the name of improved legibility, the lines are now distanced a bit more. I had to close Microsoft Word before it exploded again while I tried to be too fancy for it. It’s a long story between me and my computer, which degenerated in my writing the first draft of a novel using a fountain pen on a little round table at the café near my place in Berkeley. Perhaps it’s because the first half of my professional life was spent writing that kind of software which would crash unexpectedly at two a.m. under eyes reddened by fat greenish pixels on a CRT. Anyway, here it is.

An all-prose edition, adorned with some photos I randomly took around here. Four great authors, starting with M.S. Allen’s “Who Did What to Whom?” the story of the narrator’s dying ex-lover. I squirmed when I felt an IV tube being ripped out (I would be a nurse, were it not for IV tubes and needles), and I thought it was funny that there could be mobsters who are, in a sense, independent. The next story, Vincent Meis’ “There You Go Again,” is that of the ultimate absent father, the one who leaves his children permanently wondering if he ever cared about them. Richard Mandrachio also returns with memories of lovers in stories framed like an odyssey in “Resurface Tension,” and Kevin Langson has a narrator sitting in an Indian restaurant interacting with friends he’s leaving.

I’m going to announce here not to expect a Fall edition, as I decided to follow the advice of many writers who tell us to sit down and write every day. I tried that one morning, on purpose, to see if I could revive a story I had abandoned, and it worked. Pages are being written, and this is only the first draft, the one that allows me to develop each character a little bit more every day. It will take years, I tell my friends, before I can show you anything.

Unless, of course, anyone out there would like to take over. I could think of many roles that could be filled, of editors for each writing genre, a copy editor, and a type setter. And if we wanted to go into print, a real publisher who could find where the money is.

Meanwhile, enjoy this edition!

Guy Tiphane

Table of Contents:

Who Did What to Whom? by M.S. Allen page 2

There You Go Again, by Vincent Meis page 12

Resurface Tension, by Richard Mandrachio page 16

Farewells from a Curry Den, by Kevin Langson page 21

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