The Medulla Review – 2012

Before you read The Medulla Review, take everything you think you know about our world and throw it out the window; the stories contained within the issue will challenge new ways to think about the way it actually works. You’ll discover a world in which all men turn, quite literally, into pigs; you’ll meet a man who removes, again quite literally, the faces of women before he can sleep with him; you’ll be introduced, in biography form, to Judas Horse, the world’s greatest cheese artist (“he is best known for his map sculptures of each of the fifty United States and territories of Puerto Rico, Guam and the USVI done entirely in cheese, chewed into shape by his own unique teeth”); and you’ll even find yourself navigating a maze as a lonely lab rat.

Before you read The Medulla Review, take everything you think you know about our world and throw it out the window; the stories contained within the issue will challenge new ways to think about the way it actually works. You’ll discover a world in which all men turn, quite literally, into pigs; you’ll meet a man who removes, again quite literally, the faces of women before he can sleep with him; you’ll be introduced, in biography form, to Judas Horse, the world’s greatest cheese artist (“he is best known for his map sculptures of each of the fifty United States and territories of Puerto Rico, Guam and the USVI done entirely in cheese, chewed into shape by his own unique teeth”); and you’ll even find yourself navigating a maze as a lonely lab rat.

“Pig Days” by Amy Boyles is a flash piece in which slowly all the men in the world—the young boys too—turn into swine. Perhaps women are empowered by this, but there is one important thing that goes wrong—without men, they cannot reproduce. A highly entertaining plot, “Pig Days” is backed with humorous and witty lines. When one male manages to escape his fate as a pig, a publicity company decides to hold a competition to see which woman he will choose: “At the announcement, girls fainted in front of their television sets, forty-year old women made appointments with their plastic surgeons and those of us in menopause began bleeding again.”

In another very short flash piece, Robert Scotellaro gives great insight from developing a small slice of life—a husband watching his wife for a few moments as she practices levitation:

My wife has propelled herself, gradually, nearly a foot across the room, beaming. If only we lived our lives in freeze frame, that nano second off the ground, could be more fully savored.

Sweat dripping off the ends of their noses, they continue to struggle up and down. Down, because gravity is a bitch. Up, because some things just seem to matter that much.

I can’t stop thinking about the imagery and sounds in Kelly Michels’s poem “Notes from the Missing.” Here is a small taste:

If I put my ear to the ground,
I can hear children laughing on another continent
like the taste of honey,
blue light spilling from their eyes
their lips parting an ocean
faces not yet crowded
or known or ripped apart
by time, smooth as clouds,
smooth as coins ricocheting
off rain puddles.

I want to be them,
take their voices into my throat
breathe them into my lungs

Featuring fiction, flash fiction, and poetry, The Medulla Review offers a lot of outrageous stories and plots that are backed with carefully crafted writing.
[www.themedullareview.com]