River Teeth -- A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

Fall 1999

Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1999

"There are, however, small parts of every past that resist this cycle: there are hard, cross-grained whorls of human experience that remain inexplicably lodged in us, long after the straight-grained narrative material that housed them has washed away."

David James Duncan

Facts That Matter, page 4

The Editorial Board, page 8

River Teeth: An introduction, page 8

by David James Duncan

The Clearwater, page 14

by Kim Barnes

Small Change, page 28

by Leon Dash and Susan Sheehan

Sex and the Gimpy Girl, page 44

by Nancy Mairs

A Death in the Family, page 52

by Jon Franklin

By Force, Threat, or Deception, page 67

by Joe Mackall

The Language of Love in Richard Selzer's "The Consultation", page 85

by Ronald J. Nelson

Altogether the Wrong Color, page 98

by Brian Mooney

Burning Balkans: 1915, 1999

Serbia: The Country of Death, page 108
by John Reed
Kosovo under fire, page 122
by Philip Smucker

Contributors, page 137

from River Teeth: An Introduction

by David James Duncan

When an ancient streamside tree finally falls into its bordering river, it drowns as would a human, and begins to disintegrate with surprising speed. On the Northwest streams I know best, the breakdown of even a five- or six-hundred-year-old tree takes only a few decades. Tough as logs are, the grinding of sand, water and ice are relentless; the wood turns punk, grows waterlogged, breaks into filaments, then gray mush; the mush becomes mud, washes downriver, comes to rest in side channels which fill and gradually close; new trees sprout from the fertile muck.

from The Clearwater

by Kim Barnes

I take the river a step at a time. My feet slide from the shoulders of rock; my toes wedge between boulders. I am timid about this, moving out toward center, where the water is deepest, where the big fish might lie. Here at Lenore, the Clearwater is not easy. Too wide to cast from shore, too swift, too pocked with hidden currents and sudden holes. I go at it anyway, still without waders, determined to find my place of stability, the water at my belly, my thighs numbing with cold.

from Small Change

by Leon Dash and Susan Sheehan

It was still 85 degrees at 8 p.m. that Sunday night in July, but it felt even hotter inside Lester Hicks's apartment. And, like most summer nights, there was nothing but re-runs on TV. Bored at the home he shared with his mother, Lester Hicks stood up, snapped off the television set, and headed toward 52nd Street, NE, in the Deanwood section of Washington, D.C. Lester knew both the corner and the youths who frequented it well; two years earlier, when he was 16, he had dabbled at selling small amounts of crack cocaine there to earn money "to go to the movies or do whatever with." back to top

from Sex and the Gimpy Girl

by Nancy Mairs

The other day, I went into a tizzy. As a rule, I avoid this state, not merely because it violates the reticent courtesy demanded by my Yankee upbringing but because it reinforces the misperception that people with disabilities are difficult to deal with. But to be honest, sometimes I get sick of acting the Girl Scout of cripples, and I fall out of (or perhaps into my true) character.

On this day, I had scheduled a Pap smear at a clinic new to me, on the eighth floor of the hospital at the center of the Arizona Health Sciences Center. In this building, I can't reach higher than "3" on the elevator buttons, so I must make sure someone else gets on with me.

from A Death in the Family

by Jon Franklin

It was dawn when David Brewer arrived at the Duke Primate Center to find two cars parked outside the loading doors. One belonged to Cathy Williams, the primate center veterinarian, and the other to her assistant. David knew instantly that something was wrong.

David, the senior keeper on weekends, had anticipated that Saturday would be a difficult day. For one thing, this was homecoming weekend, and that guaranteed a lot of visitors. And then, just before Friday's shift ended, Messalina had become ill.

Messalina was a Propithecus tattersalli, or golden-crowned sifaka—a delicate, long-limbed lemur that had to be one of nature's most beautiful creatures. Her face and hands were as delicately carved as black onyx, set in a cloud of white and gold fur.

from By Force, Threat, or Deception

by Joe Mackall

On Friday the 13, just 12 days before his 42nd birthday, a birthday he swore he'd never see, Don pulled out of his parking space at a job he hated and turned into eastbound traffic. As he headed down Detroit Ave. to one of his favorite bars, he turned on his headlights to combat the disappearance of daylight, on one of those winter afternoons when darkness comes before supper, when evening subsumes late afternoon, when all that is known of daytime bows to the early night.

from The Language of Love in Richard Selzer's "The Consultation"

by Ronald J. Nelson

Fiction and nonfiction conventionally are described as opposing concepts—the former taking the reader on an imaginative journey through a made-up reality, the latter on a factual journey through reality. The best of both genres, however, create a virtual reality that plunges the reader into an adventure of the spirit. It is a journey that engages both mind and heart, perhaps penetrating to what Joseph Conrad refers to in the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" as "the secret spring of responsive emotions." Good writers of both genres create a "personal transaction that is at the heart of good nonfiction writing," two of the most important traits of which are "humanity and warmth."

from Altogether the Wrong Color

by Brian Mooney

Outside the family room of the ICU at Brigham & Women's Hospital, my father holds forth about the general weakening of the human species and how we should all suck in our guts and stop complaining about every little thing. All this whining about asbestos poisoning and lead poisoning and electromagnetic fields--that's all it is, whining. My brother, of course, disagrees immediately. He is a paramedic and emergency-room nurse, and he knows about bodies and what they do when draining of life: what color they turn, what odors they emit, what excretions glaze the skin. We all keep asking him why Uncle Tony's eyes are rolled back like that, and why so yellow, and why have the doctor's stuck a probe into his heart? His answers are filled with a sympathy and patience I'm not accustomed to hearing from him.

from Serbia: The Country of Death

by John Reed

SALONIKA, Greece (1915) -- We rubbed ourselves from head to foot with camphorated oil, put kerosene on our hair, filled our pockets with mothballs, and sprinkled naphthalene through our baggage and boarded a train so saturated with formalin that our eyes and lungs burned as with quicklime. The Americans from the Standard Oil office in Salonika strolled down to bid us a last farewell.

"Too bad," said Wiley. "So young, too. Do you want the remains shipped home, or shall we have you buried up there?"

These were the ordinary precautions of travelers bound for Serbia, the country of the typhus—abdominal typhus, recurrent fever, and the mysterious and violent spotted fever, which kills fifty percent of its victims and whose bacillus no man had then discovered.

from Kosovo Under Fire

by Philip Smucker

PRISTINA, Kosovo (27 March 1999) -- For the past two years I have made Yugoslavia my home. I covered the "democracy uprising" in the streets of Belgrade two years ago and fell in love with a kind and sensitive Serbian woman. When Kosovo began its descent into hell last year, I moved in permanently with Ivana, now my wife, and took up residence on a hill where I'd been tear-gassed a few months earlier by Serbian police while covering a peaceful Albanian student demonstration. As the civil war unfolded in Kosovo, I grew attached to its kind Serbian Orthodox priests, its angry young Albanian intellectuals, and its soft-spoken farmers. To lighten the burden of covering massacres and attending funerals in the hinterlands, I had the idea with five other European journalists to open a pub.