Category Archives: Nonfiction

by hipacificreview | 01/19/2017 · 9:16 am

Blessed Event(ually)

by JC Reilly

Like that cow-mother we saw once on our Grandpa’s Pennsylvania farm, straining with her calf that warm November day, you too lay impatient and writhing for your boy to come. Late, it would be the first of many times he’d defy you. “No drugs,” you’d said.

Tied to machines and IV, the nurse-call button strangled in your right hand like a dead mouse, you were trussed as the turkey your in-laws would roast ten days later on Thanksgiving. Something tar-like and unholy lurked in your all-pupil eyes. Curses no devil dare speak steamed from your mouth like poisoned milk. Continue reading →

The Death of the Fugitive Charles Floyd in a Cornfield Outside of East Liverpool, Ohio, October 22, 1934

by Robert Miltner

(after a photograph by Andrew Borowlec)

Leaves fall along rows of tree trunks in the late October orchards. The last apples hang, red as the cheeks of pretty children playing in the first snow of winter.

In town, stunted skeletons of burr oak, catalpa, and Osage orange irregularly line the waste lots located along the train tracks. Wasps buzz, ready to swarm relentlessly if their underground nests are threatened.

Continue reading →

To Die On Kilimanjaro

by John Coyne

When I was first at the Blue Marlin Hotel at the edge of the Indian Ocean in the summer of ’63 the hotel was full of Brits. It was the last days before Kenya’s independence. By the late Sixties the Brits had been replaced by German tourists. Today, I’m told, the village, and most of Kenya, suffers from a lack of tourists because of Al-Shabbaab.

My story begins, however, in the early ‘70s when the hotel was full of Germans and where the few English speaking tourists gravitated to one end of the bar. It was there that I met Phillip and his beautiful wife, April, and their two lovely young daughters. They were finishing up dinner and I was dining alone and we started up a conversation, as English speakers strangers will when they are outnumbered. Continue reading →

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by hipacificreview | 05/12/2016 · 7:47 am

Whirling Disease

by Kelly Sundberg
(Originally appeared in The Denver Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 3)

Before:

We piled into a car, four girl-women in our early twenties, a tent, a cooler full of food, and plastic baggy full of magic mushrooms. The car wound along the tight curves of the river, canyon walls rising sharply on either side, sunlight filtering through the glass.

We stood in the middle of a stream, skirts tucked up around our waists, passing a fly rod between us and casting a line. The line flicked forward, hesitated gracefully in an arc before landing softly on the water. The cold stream funneled around us. We broke the arc of that glassy water. A silver glitter danced by my feet. A trout. It broke the surface, creating a circle on the smooth water, radiating into more circles, then slipping away soundlessly. Continue reading →

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by hipacificreview | 04/07/2016 · 9:27 am

Moloka`i Homestead, 1933

by Kirby Wright

The aina makes demands. Brownie’s thankful her husband built the bamboo shanty and filled it with axes, picks, shovels, and hoes. There are carpentry tools too: hammers, handsaws, a block plane, and chisels. She’s proud of her cinder block home overlooking the channel and the water tank on stilts the paniolos helped Chipper raise. She worries about the tank running dry and what will happen if Chip loses his Army pension. Driving cattle at Pu`u O Hoku Ranch made him mean, the kind of mean that turns everything good between a man and woman bad. Clearing trees brought hate when she matched him swing for swing. Now husband help is tough to come by.
Continue reading →

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