Orchid Literary Review

Maureen Aitken, Keith Hood, and Cathy Mellett, eds. (paper, 185 pages; $8)

Reviewed by Adam Schuitema

After debuting in 2002, the second issue of the Ann Arbor-based publication is now on shelves. Though you will find interviews with established writers within its pages, as well as the occasional poem, the mission of Orchid is clearly communicated on its cover: “Celebrating stories and the art of storytelling.” And readers are among those celebrating.

Many of the magazine’s stories center on characters forced to process tragedy in their lives, and by the end, there is a marked change in their thoughts or behavior, but it is an ambiguous change, still not fully understood by them. The result is a haunting echo of unease that remains with the reader after he or she has turned the page and begun the next story.

Among the standouts is “Blossoms and Branches,” a short-short by James Ward. In a country landscape coated by a recent ice storm, a father and son drive to a railroad bridge where a local boy recently hanged himself. The rope still dangles from the bridge, and the father has his son climb up and take the rope down with a pocketknife. “Neither my father nor I said a word on the short drive home. The rope lay in front of me, on the floor of the car. I kept my feet against the door so I wouldn’t touch it.” The prose is as brisk and sharp as the weather, creating a quiet stillness in which even strong things, like the frozen cherry branches, are more fragile than they appear.

Different in style and atmosphere, but similar in terms of its poignancy, Cindy Dale’s “Do Not Do the Arithmetic” revolves around Callie, a woman obsessed with the potential for tragedy—the alarming statistics about illnesses and accidents—and her luck in having dodged such bullets. Even after she is struck by an ambulance, with relatively little harm done, she is continually consumed with a child in the newspapers who died unexpectedly of E. coli. Again, Callie feels the weight of facts and numbers, even through her husband, a stockbroker, who is struggling against a current of falling prices. And the final lines of the story reveal the endlessness of both numbers and tragedy: “Outside the sky is falling. WorldCom is down four. Crude oil is up to $8 a barrel. War is breaking out in the Middle East . And somewhere on the New Jersey turnpike, a few miles south of the Joyce Kilmer exit, a school bus filled with fourth and fifth graders… is about to careen out of control, leaping the divide into four lanes of oncoming traffic.”

Bonnie Jo Campbell captures the suddenness of tragedy with a deft touch in “Storm Warning.” On a sanguine summer day, Doug is involved in a boat accident that leaves him in the hospital with the prospect of a long, painful recovery. Campbell chooses not to employ a scene break, but instead moves from the pleasure of one moment to the pain of the next with the quickness of the accident itself. “Doug was propelled through the Plexiglas windshield toward the prow to meet a metal ladder and wooden planking in a bone-splintering moment of twisting motion halted, resulting in twelve hours of emergency surgery and ten days in the hospital with a morphine pump.” And with that, the reader feels the jarring crush of all that has changed, a change the character is forced to interpret when he is alone in his house, confined to a bed, as a storm gathers and a tornado warning is declared.

In addition to the works themselves, the contributors of Orchid are given space at the end of the magazine in a section called “Afterthoughts,” where they can share an experience about the writing life, good advice they have received, or discuss a literary work that they wish they had written. It is another example of the magazine caring about the ideas of emerging writers and helping to amplify their voices.

Adam Schuitema is a PhD candidate at Western Michigan University, specializing in fiction.