For the magazine’s fourth anniversary we have a section of Classic Gator: articles and graphics from the original online edition illustrating the geography and history of Novellas County. It is all lovingly reproduced down to the font that appeared on the website (Comic Sans).

In ‘Stories on the Prowl’ Gabriel Orgrease writes: “On a Saturday night the street corners of Gator Springs are full of stories. They like to congregate in groups and to show off their latest fashions.” He advises “do not look a story straight in the eyes (particularly one with multiple points of view.)” There is a map showing Gator Springs landmarks such as the Morpheus Arms, Artistic License Office, Fandango Virtual Slush Pile, Memorial to the Unpublished Writer and Belaboured Point. Some might say it’s all just an in-joke for writers, but what the hell — shouldn’t writers get to have a laugh too? It certainly made this writer emit some chuckles.

However, some other reprinted material from an early ‘Infamous Cross-Dressing Issue’ doesn’t stand up to time in the same way. ‘Cross-Dressing’ means that a male writer writes as a female, and vice-versa. In light of the other stories in this issue, it seemed a bit redundant.

For instance, Sue O’Neill’s ‘The Curse’ — the most outstanding story — easily takes on male and female points of view. Imagine a storyline similar to E Annie Proulx’s ‘The Accordion Crimes’, except the object in question is a pair of tickets to see the Red Sox.

In Boston, an old man is hit by a streetcar as he crosses the road. First to rush to his side is an academic gentlemen, who looks in the man’s wallet to find out who he is. Secreted there are the tickets. Well, the old guy won’t be needing those…

Cut to the old man’s grief-stricken niece at the funeral. Every year she’d gone with her uncle (really a stand-in father) to see the Red Sox play the Yankees. She realises that the game is coming up, and she wants to go in honour of her uncle. She looks in the wallet that the police had handed her, knowing the tickets would be there — but they’re gone. She roundly curses whoever stole them. And things don’t bode well for those who do get hold of these tickets by whatever means — the lecherous professor, the student who acquires them by blackmailing the old lech, a professional ticket scalper, a wino, a lonely exchange student.

While this is one of the longest stories in the magazine, it could have done with more space to reach its full potential. This atmospheric piece with a grand sense of its Boston locale and diverse crew of characters could be the basis of a novella or even a novel.

Much less successful is the other long story, Colin O’Sullivan’s ‘What Did You Do With My Salamander?’ A man who appears to be a mental health worker manipulates his charges to take gory revenge on an ex-girlfriend while she is on holiday with a woman lover. Among them is Sally, who continually asks the title question because her father had hammered to pieces a pet tortoise that she calls a salamander. With this horrific image at its centre, the story could have explored how victims of violence may come to perpetuate it. However, an apparent desperation to shock comes out in a gloating tone that is only irritating. For example, Sally becomes so excited that “the hair on her legs becomes wet with tiny streams of piss.” When reading this I could only contemplate certain anatomical impossibilities — does the woman have a bladder or some kind of internal sprinkler system? Then I started to wonder when I saw the Gator guidelines on seeking writing “with an eye towards irony, a mind tilted on its edge and a tongue planted firmly in cheek”: is this story meant to be satirical and I missed the joke? If so, I might not be the only one.

Moving on from the longest to the shortest, I’m not the biggest fan of flash fiction. But I found some very effective examples of it here. In ‘Wouldn’t Have Fit’, Elissa Washuta links the disposal of a rotten peach to another kind of emptiness. Jai Clare’s ‘Jack and Jill’ deftly captures the point where a relationship goes sour. There is a short and charming (though longer than flash) were-bear romance, Ann Walters’ ‘Love Changes Everything’. Considerably less charming, yet equally entertaining is Jay Wexler’s view of love among the lawyers in ‘Eenie Meenie’.

Then there are stories based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes. We have Snow White in GW Cox’s ‘White Magic’, and Margaret Foley does Rapunzel in ‘Salad Days’. Julie Balloo’s ‘Tales From Morpheus Descending’ is a series of vignettes drawing on fairy tales or rhymes. These are just too whimsical and lacking in real characterisation for my taste — common pitfalls of the ‘fractured fairy tale’ form.

The magazine is rounded out with poetry by Corey Mesler, Jamie Zerndt and Thomas O’Connell, and further fiction that I enjoyed by writers including Pieter Mayer, J Salini-Genovese, Brett Pransky and Maíre Reilly. We even have a recipe in ‘Whole Roasted Gourmet Gator’, which advises the cook to “shred with a machete” and “Tenderise dead gator by driving tank caterpillars over corpse.” Now, there’s a laugh or two that is not restricted to writers!

I did like the overall tenor and presentation of the magazine, even when particular stories didn’t work. Gator Springs’ quirkiness, humour and inventiveness makes it a publication that is worth watching.

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fictions include stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus contributions to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers and Deep Ten anthologies. Her work is currently showcased in Midnight Street 4 (www/midnightstreet.co.uk), and a story is due to appear in Café Ole: Too Hot to Handle (Independent Persons Press). She has also written reviews for TTA, Interzone and of course, www.laurahird.com. Rosanne lives in South London with a rather demanding 17-year-old cat. Sometimes she works as a freelance sub-editor; other forms of toil have included stints as a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker and full-time dole claimer. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, Rosanne has completed one novel and is working on a second.

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© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.

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