LITMIR.BIZ

       Unchained Melody

      More fortissimo. Lift your voice higher.

      Your singing is terrible, where is your fire?

      Fill up your lungs. You’ll never get it right.

      Practice, more practice, if it takes all the night!

      You push me too hard, she gasped, in despair.

      You sit there so smug, relaxed in a chair.

      But you will get yours, rang out in her head,

      And she forced a high C as she thought of him dead.

      Well, her sharp note rose high, vibrating the room,

      And the acoustic ceiling started to boom,

      And the chandelier fell with that lethal note

      And his tirade was stopped by a shard in the throat.

      Joy Hewitt Mann’s work has appeared in hundreds of publications internationally. She has won the Leacock Award for poetry and the Acorn-Rukeyser Award. Boheme Press, Toronto, published her short story collection, Clinging to Water, in 2000. Boheme will publish her first full-length poetry collection, Bone on Bone, and her first novel, Lacrima Christi, in 2003. She is working on her next novel, Los Penitentes.

       Knocking on Heaven’s Door

      Cecilia Kennedy

      Who set fire to Glen Wylie’s barn? That question brought my boss, Sergeant Carr, to the hospital the night my son was born. He tracked me down at the display case of healthy newborns, where I looked past to the glass room marked INTENSIVE CARE: NO ADMITTANCE. No infant visible, just four white uniforms pulling lights and tubes and equipment toward a tiny hidden table.

      Though I’d been on duty that night, I didn’t see the big timbers of Wylie’s barn collapse. Didn’t even hear about it for hours, because I was holding April’s hand in the nightmare light of the delivery room. This baby had showed up weeks ahead of schedule, a frantic arrival nothing like the gentle fiction we’d been prepared for in that birthing class. And then Intensive Care had kidnapped the baby.

      So my mind was elsewhere when Carr fired off a rapid, “Hey, Tony, congratulations,” and scanned the lineup for a baby with the Aardehuis label. When he didn’t see one, he skipped straight to quizzing me about Glen Wylie and the likelihood that he might have torched his own barn.

      “Fire guys say it was arson. Nothing clever about it: good old gasoline. You think he might a done it? Place is insured to the max.”