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**PRINT: THE2NDHAND’s 31st broadsheet features a short by Portland-by-way-of-Montana writer Aaron Parrett that captures the power and glory of ambivalence after, during, and prior to what the unemployed poet-protagonist comes to clearly see as, if not love, then surely "Tolerance," the story's title. Parrett is the author of The Translunar Narrative in the Western Tradition as well as numerous stories that have been featured in lit mags around the nation. No. 31 also features a piece by Kyle Beachy, author of the newly released novel The Slide, out from Dial Press, and a vanguard discount coupon and special FAQ from the herbal remedies and soap makers at The Left Hand (thelefthand.net).

**WEB: VERY SMALL CURES Alec Niedenthal
DIARY OF A PHONE SEX OPERATOR Peepshow Girl
MY OWN PERSONAL GLOBAL WARMING Christian Rose
TWO SHORTS FROM DAVID GIANATASIO David Gianatasio
THE CRASH OF THE AVALON Jasmine Neosh
DRINK IT IN Damian Caudill
MIXTAPE: LA LA Quincy Rhoads
NO SMALL FEAT Kyle Beachy
HIDEOUS BOUNTY: G.O.D. | Andrew Davis
STOIC COMMANDERS OF FAT MALE THIGHS, Part 2 Marc Baez
WING & FLY: BEST OF 2008: SACRIFICIAL CIRCUMCISION OF THE BRONX, review | Todd Dills

VERY SMALL CURES
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Alec Niedenthal

Niedenthal had never been published, till now. He is single, and will be reading at THE2NDHAND's No. 31 release party at Greencup Books in Birmingham this coming Friday, March 20, 2009. Click here for details.

She wanted to have the baby but he didn't like that idea really because of a lot of reasons he never wanted to elaborate on, besides of course he didn't want her to have it, really he just didn't want it but it was enough for him to say that he didn't want her to have it and then she did anyway and so then he left the country on a plane which showed him many spectacular in-flight movies. He was nearly 30 and he fled the country and he would inquire of anyone who asked him why he did that, after confessing to them the reasons by which he had come to be in a place with them, he would ask them who can blame me? and they would answer in their heads, I can.

Columbia College Fiction Writing Department

Sixteen, she was sixteen, and this baby was upon birth approximately one-seventeenth her age. Realizing this, she held it, prepared to hold it until one of them gave. One of them gave. She held it, not letting it give, crushing it, cementing it to life, unbearably frigid in the aim of its movements, not fixed to the body itself but to the space allowing it motion, but then its respiration began to work in sputtering fits, rapidly leaving the holes of possibility, she holding it and saying please just be OK please please, you are you are what made things OK just be OK please, and its heart for all intents and purposes imploded, caving in and its breath-impoverished cries quieting, searching for space, unavailing, and then so it died but she held it, still saying the quiet and delicate things she had been saying for a long time.

He lived in Paris and was arrested and tried and he was convicted for the violent rape of a thirteen-year-old girl with blonde hair spread all over her body who frequently shaved the hairs off of the area encompassing her vagina like she was snuffing out a colony of ants. He attested in court that she practically begged for the abuse he gave her, his tragic defense, and even the physical pain. But then she wept inconsolably and his French was also poor syntactically and so then he hanged himself, waddling on the ceiling.

She eventually in age 19 married a man, a man who liked often to go work and who liked to drink and who liked to manufacture crystal methamphetamines in the living room and whose age was more commensurate with her own and who was attuned to the brief necessities of her person and they were peaceably situated, before he came home especially drunken one night and he stabbed her in the neck and the throat consecutively, as it were, with a blunt screwdriver, in a tiredly quaint and communal trailer park situated in eastern Tennessee, raising three children and later losing them on a clear spring day to men, who also often liked to go work, in important suits with shiny hair partitioned disproportionately in two. These three men, who enjoyed very much to work and to wear their important suits and to take the children of extremely bad negligent people like these, had heard rumors of all the bad things she and her husband had done, all of the things which neither could recall, done in the hours of nights spent supinely alone, lifeless in gesture and impressively silent. When these men in important suits took them the children cried for her and so did she cry, a lyrical cry for them and for herself and for her and for her fumbled will to keep them, to retain their frequent misery, now bereft of them, loving them but so unstoppably unable to hold on to, a sage of wandering, crying. If they were taken so she was taken, 21 and searching for razor blades in the unfurnished living room of her trailer.

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OUR FRIENDS AT The Left Hand make great soap, salves, balms and other natural hygiene-type stuff, in addition to publishing a zine and running a book swap, a performance series and more from their Tuscaloosa, AL, homebase. When they offered to make something for us, we jumped. We introduce THE2NDHAND soap, an olive oil soap with a quadruple dose of Bergamot, "for the readers we've sullied..." Price is $6, ppd.

**BOOKS BY THE2NDHAND CONTRIBUTORS at Amazon

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