#2: "Clockwise" by Dana Cann

~This piece previously appeared in The Florida Review (2006)

            On the night they died, the Wynn family, each in his or her bed on the second floor of their house on Maiden Lane, dreamed of the children—of Tina Wynn, the girl, and Brandon Wynn, the boy—flying, clockwise, through the rooms and hallways that formed a loop on the first floor. It was the same loop the children had run when they were small, chasing one another or being chased by their father or their mother or, on occasion, both. But tonight they did so in their dreams, and they did so in the air, without touching the ground. And all the while the gas from the cracked furnace seeped up the stairwells and through the floorboards and vents, which brought the heat from the furnace’s flame to the rest of the house.

            C-O, the father, Gordon Wynn, would have thought, had he been awake rather than asleep, had CO been the sort of gas one could smell or taste. But he knew, of course, that CO was not that sort of gas. He knew, in fact, if he had been conscious, that he would have become sleepy—so sleepy that he would have become unconscious, and that would have been his only clue something was wrong. And who didn’t get sleepy in the middle of the night, when all was dark and quiet?

            CO. Such an innocent formula. Drop an O off a substance as harmless as carbon dioxide, and it’s suddenly poison? But, sure enough, one by one, each member of the Wynn family ceased to breathe.

            But before they did, they dreamed.

Looking Good!

Thanks to Bill Skillern for our new masthead!

Subscription Information & Open Submissions in October

We will post a new piece next week.  Please bear with us as we get acclimated to running a journal; we’ll be posting weekly very soon.  So much great work out there…!

Some news:

~ Redux will hold an open submission period in late October.  Please check back for more details.

~ You may receive a free email subscription to Redux by entering your information in the box in the right column

~ You may subscribe to Redux on Kindle for a small fee.  The link for more information about that option is here.

#1: "Ostriches" by Susan Tekulve

~~this piece previously appeared in New Letters (2006)

The dark hours.  Dreaming, Sadie stands on her front porch in a hurricane, her bra flying out of her hands, rising into the dark arms of hemlock that shred its lace and batting.  She wakes, reaches into her cotton night gown, touches the cyst curled above the jagged scar across her chest. In the mirror at the foot of her bed, her face is haloed by fine, white hair, her skin clear as lilies from all the radiation treatments.  Outside the window, telephone wires twist into the hemlock, and the blue mountain ridge hulks against the red-streaked November sky.  She glances back to the telephone on the bed stand, thinking, I cannot tell this over the phone.

Down in the kitchen, her husband, Dean, sleeps on the picnic bench beside the table, one frost bitten hand resting across his chest.  The stove’s eyes are covered with dirty pots and pans, the counters lined with jars of apple butter, squares of brown sugar fudge, a whole chess pie he made for her yesterday.  Above the china-filled hutch, his rifle rests. His long, silver hair unwashed, his square chin unshaved, he looks like one of the old-time mountain men who sometimes wander through the cemetery beside the house, cursing at the cats napping on the tombstones.  When Dean wakes, he’ll take the gun into the wooded ridges above their house to hunt wild boar, elk, ram, stock the freezer full of wild game. After months spent in still hospital waiting rooms, he needs this walking.  He’ll wander for hours on his land, up leaf-covered ridges that kettle their red brick house, his flintlock rifle on his back. 

Sadie pulls Dean’s red and black flannel hunting jacket over her nightgown, slips his boots over two pairs of wool socks.   When the screen door creaks, Dean startles, grabs the edge of the table, pulls himself up. 

“Sis?”

 “I’ve got to go tell her,” she says. 

Redux: Work Worth a Second Run

Hello—

Welcome to Redux, the online literary journal devoted to finding lost gems of print age contemporary literature and bringing them to the internet.  “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, but that was before the internet came along.  Surely in the vast expanse of whatever-it-is (a cloud?) that is the internet, Redux can claim a tiny corner to feature previously published literary work, stories and poems that are too fabulous to be locked away in the dungeon of page 64 in a lovely—but now forgotten—issue of a literary journal tucked away in the dark stacks of a university library.

Each week, we’ll feature one story or a selection of poems or an essay that has been previously published in print only, work that is not contained in a book or anthology.  The author will offer a few thoughts about why he/she has selected this work to share with the world.  And you, dear reader, are asked only to enjoy.

You may sign up for a free subscription above, in the upper right hand corner of the screen.  Be assured that your name and email address will not be used for anything other than notification that Redux has been updated.  We’ll be up and running with a great story next week, and as we work through our growing pains, we’ll be posting something every other week, with an eye to moving the journal to weekly publications soon.

You can learn more about the Editorial Board here.

If you’re a writer who would like us to consider your work for inclusion on Redux, please carefully consult the submission guidelines found here.  We will be open for submissions in the near future. 

Thank you, and we’re looking forward to doing our small part to help great work reach new readers!

~~Leslie Pietrzyk, Editor