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Old Europe by Bruce Benderson
For some time I’ve been in love with Old Europe, though she treats me like a stupid, underage concubine. My American friends wonder what I can see in such a worn-out tart, her silly Cupid’s bow drawn with lipstick over a slack mouth, her hackneyed prejudices and skin cast in the pallor of a bad liver.
I adore sliding my tongue between her set of rotting teeth, caressing the permanent scars on her skin from decades of constraining corsets, inhaling the complex, fermented odor of her sighing breath. I also love her supple evasions when it comes to discussing her past, the way her eyes go blank when she thinks of all that trauma.
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The Omorashi Girls by Garrett Caples
Takiguchi was delighted. The director lit a cigarette. It was his symbol of delight. Otherwise he was expressionless. He exhaled languidly, crossing his legs, seemingly absorbed in a spot on his boot. Takiguchi, it must be said, dressed like a director but only while editing. “Film is editing,” he would say with a solemnity immune to contradiction, and the fact he worked in video. “On the street would be conspicuous.”
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THE MERIT SYSTEM by Lewis Warsh
He assumed he was doing her a favor by telling her what he was feeling. He assumed that honesty in any form was a virtue and that there was no point in keeping secrets from the person you lived with, pretending you felt one way when the opposite was true. It was only later, when he left the apartment and walked across town to his brother’s apartment to spend the night, that he began feeling guilty about hurting her feelings. He realized that the only reason he had said what he did was to get back at her for something equally hideous that she had said to him a few weeks before. He knew that he didn’t want to go through life hurting people. What he had said to her, her reaction, the way he was feeling about it now, was familiar to him. He had played out this scenario years ago with other women. It never occurred to him that she might be relieved by what he had said, that she had sensed the depth of his enmity towards her for years (impossible to disguise when you live side by side), and that she was growing weary of living in the shadow of the illusion that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together.
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The Orgy by Lynda Schor
The idea of an orgy made me nervous rather than excited. I pictured about twenty gorgeous Playboy magazine-type people on an enormous, satin-sheeted round bed in some penthouse. Or a dark, damp cave-like place in the meat market district, with sounds of water dripping, and dark corners peopled with bald men and women pulling each other’s nipple rings and sewing each other’s testicles. By the time we arrived, everyone would be intertwined like some enormous octopus, one creature with many suckers and many limbs. How would we join in? What if no one desired us?
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The Rail congratulates the following winners of 2005
Ippie Awards from the Independent Press
Association-N.Y.:
1st Place, Best Overall Design: Amelia Hennighausen
1st Place, Best Story About Immigrant Issues
Gabriel Thompson, "When Even the Minimum Wage is a
Distant Dream"
(December 2004/January 2005)
2nd Place, Best Editorial/Commentary
Theodore Hamm, "Arthur Miller’s Brooklyn Legacy"
(March 2005)
3rd Place, Best Investigative/In-Depth News Story
Brian J. Carreira, "No Room at the Inn: Ratner
Continues to ’Game’ Officials and the Public" (June
2005)
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