While he was in the company of close friends, a thought about his wife would come out loud. He would start and waver and pause and then drift toward a change of subject. One night after fish-sticks and macaroni-with--cheese he excused himself from the table and left her and hadn't lived with her since. The screams won't forth, anger dribbled inward, won't voice. He spoke sensitively and sincerely about his children and about his love for them. There were two things that he often claimed to know for certain about life: life is beautiful and life is complicated. I felt sad whenever he repeated it to me, because of how the complications of life had hurt and confused and depressed him. How can we imagine peace-on-earth? when a ton of speeding steel can kill us on a highway near our home? Jack was raised and educated in status quo, patriotic suburbia. After sixteen months in the Army he wanted to be a conscientious objector. He told his platoon sergeant that practicing to kill was the same as killing, and then he refused to compute any more fire missions even though that was his duty. They assigned him to be a clerk. No. 11 Thou shalt not shit thyself. His beliefs cycled from one extreme to another within the span of a few months. He never became officially classified as a conscientious objector but he kept the job as a clerk. Before he formally applied for conscientious objector status he went to a mountain and felt that he had a vision there. He became a devout convert to Christianity. Two years later he became an apostate (disguised as an adulterer) and the church folk busied themselves with ostracism while Jack made sarcastic cracks about myths and dogma. Later, if a questionnaire required him to list his religion he would check the "other" box and write "individualist" in the blank. Has it been so long since we were Adam's dust Has it been so long since we felt Adam's lust for knowing? All this huge, immense knowing we must be to walk upon the Moon and breathe beneath the Sea. The two hardbound books in the back of the drawer were the kind made for keeping a journal. When they were new they contained only ruled and numbered pages. He had used them for his novels. The pages were filled with his imagination as it was transformed into his longhand and the whole of it was written down and called finished at the same time it cascaded out of his pen in the first draft. One book was called "The Reign of Acumen" and stopped after 126 pages of unrevised prose. The other book was untitled and contained 211 pages of narrative about the journey of a prophet across North America during the twenty-first century. I had read them both five years ago when he decided to stop working on them. The regret that I had felt upon my first reading echoed and amplified itself as I returned the books to their hallowed place in the back of the file. I am a peasant in the valley and I know from whence comes love. It comes rushing through the scrub oak from the mountains up above. A mutual friend confided to me that Jack's capacity for loving was extraordinary. A force shimmered behind his eyes and sheltered itself behind the coolness of his hands when he touched . . . She said that it was always special, always sensual, even during the down times. He lived with her for a year and a half and loved her and then left. I had heard him say that he couldn't understand any reason why he should have left her and he spoke with a measured amount of after-thought that strained through his story. She told me that there was only one reason why it ended; he had chosen it. An alternative? As if it were simple. As if we either do this or do that without walking across the space in between. Those who have made a choice see the journey as a wasteful trek and the sojourner as an aimless drifter. I turned the ornate key to lock the drawer leaned back in his chair sucked hollowly at the air slowly let it out lifted empty palms to my face wept. His desk top held a half-circle of books which surrounded his work area. An unabridged dictionary, a thesaurus, and Holman's Handbook to Literature; Postle's Fabric of the Universe and John Milton's Major Prose and Poetry; Bullfinch's Mythology, and Gib-ran's Prophet; Cooke's America and Leakey's Origins; May's Courage to Create and Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action; a Bible; an illustrated history of the world in six volumes and a history of the English language; a magazine file and several anthologies of poetry and of fiction. I noticed a 3 x 5 card that was stashed in the front of his letter holder. . . Don't be sad when I die just let my words form a sigh of joy within your living fibre. Central Pacific Passenger Coach 1860's. 4 The Aardvark Review Volume 2, Number 1 CHOREOGRAPHY by Penelope Armstrong The curtain is drawn; Dawn swells in deliberation, betraying night's secret, revealing the shimmer of dew to the thistle, whispering promises to the buttercup, coaxing the Riverbirch to join in the Celebration, thinly masking effusion. Rain races on pounding feet across the arid stage, flailing arms render swift strokes into the pourous sod quenching the flame of summer trailing Pastel scarves in their wake. Clover leaves, in tattered attire, bend in oriental courtesy under rolling beads of precipitation that balance precariously and hang from the edges before in rhythm. dropping syncopated Snow pirouettes in sequined toe shoes impishly performing the Dance of Light winking as the curtain falls. CALLERS IN THE NIGHT by Penelope Armstrong Loneliness seeps through the window pane on a moonbeam hanging in the air: a heavy mist closing in to rest on my hearth she is not dispersed with a covey of sighs nor washed away by flooding tears she saturates the void with oppression, nesting in the endlessness of time while Pain crouches at my threshold lashing in long sweeping strokes tearing at his unwary prey. Only his shadow remains, a ghostly scar moaning under cruel probing fingers of memory, pleading to be loosed from shackles of Reality time is an impure opiate. "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE" A CRITICAL ANALYSIS by Rachel A. Roche In "Good Country People", Flannery O'Connor depicts the shallow existence of modern man and the spiritual poverty which can result when he commits himself to a belief in nothingness. Through the story, the author shows man as being empty and incomplete and frequently incapable of seeing his own plight. Furthermore, O'Connor implies that man's incompleteness is due to his own ignorance or refusal to look beyond himself or beyond his own logic. These ideas are primarily embodied in the preeminent character, Hulga. Hulga's physical deformity is used to symbolize the condition of man which the author wishes to portray. The missing leg, an image of physical incompleteness, is an effective symbol of man's emotional or spiritual incompleteness the idea that he lacks some crucial element that could make him whole. In addition, the wooden leg that Hulga wears symbolizes the pathetic substitute that man uses to make up for this missing element. It is hard, lifeless, and one may assume, hollow; the "ugly jointure" where it joins on to Hulga's leg shows the basic incompatibility between man and the substitute that he has chosen. The physical characteristics of the wooden leg elicit from the reader feelings of emptiness, shallowness and even ugliness, which the author associates with man. The artificial limb takes on an even greater significance when the author states that Hulga took care of it "as someone else would his soul." In a sense, Hulga has replaced her soul or spiritual life with a lifeless, wooden object. In addition to the incompleteness of man, the characterization of Hulga also exemplifies the ignorance of man. It is significant that Hulga has earned a doctorate in philosophy which one would expect to represent the antithesis of ignorance. However, with her effective use of irony, O'Connor shows that Hulga, and therefore man, is still ignorant and deficient when he attempts to rely only on himself and his own logic. Hulga's degree in philosophy has helped her to "see through to nothing" which is exactly what it has brought to her life. Her existence, in spite of her intelligence, is as lifeless and pathetic as her wooden leg. Hulga may be very knowledgeable in the secular sense, but emotionally and spiritually she is ignorant. Through the thoughts of Mrs. Hopewell, the author describes Hulga precisely "She was brilliant but she didn't have a grain of sense." Another great fault of man, according to O'Connor, is his misplaced pride. Hulga takes great pride in her belief in nothing. She is described as "someone who has achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it" and she tells the Bible salesman that her belief in nothing is "a kind of salvation." Hulga's pride is so strong that she even flaunts her wooden leg. She clumps around noisily with it to make it all the more noticeable. "She could walk without making the awful noise but she made it Mrs. Hopewell was certain because it was ugly-sounding." Hulga's pride is also made evident by the way she feels toward the characters in the story. Her education and what she considers to be insight make her feel superior to them. This is reflected in her aloofness and her intentional rudeness to her mother and Mrs. Freeman. In fact, all the characters insulate themselves from each other, and from reality, with their ignorance and pride and are unable to communicate. The characters talk to each other but they do not relate. They are all locked into their own illusions Mrs. Freeman with her pride in her daughters and her refusal to ever "admit herself wrong," Mrs. Hopewell with her platitudes about life, Hulga with her belief in nothing and Manley Pointer with his evil selfishness. O'Connor further develops her themes throughout the story with Volume 2, Number 1 The Aardvark Review 5