The first story in issue 5 is the winner of the 2004 Richard Yates Short Story Award. ‘Fire’ by Dylan Landis deals with a young girl, Leah, who’s being bullied by two girls at school. The situation is complicated further by the fact she has a crush on Rainey, one of her tormentors. The adults around her fail to take the bullying seriously. The school principle goes so far as to suggest that it’s somehow Leah’s fault. Her mother, who appears to have an eating disorder, is distracted and uninterested, while her father thinks she’s just oversensitive. The suggestions of the adults are hopelessly inadequate. The situation reaches boiling point when Leah finally expresses her rage towards one of the bullies. ‘Fire’ is, for me, one of the best works in Night Train 5. The problem of Leah’s attraction to Rainey brings an added dimension. The story covers not only bullying, but the wider agonies of adolescence.

’United States Street Football’ by Jim Daniels follows a group of teenage boys in a rundown working class area. This is a coming of age story where a gang are forced to reassess their view of someone they previously looked up to, a youth who smashes in his girlfriend’s face and leaves her permanently brain damaged, and who accidentally kills one of their friends while trying to escape from the police. This story has much denser prose than the previous story and a slower pace. It’s more thoughtful and reflective, and offers an interesting contrast to the first.

’Daughter’ by Claudia Smith also focuses on a child. It’s a much shorter work and the revelation here is that the main character’s sister is really her mother. It’s well written though less substantial than the previous two and might have benefited from being slotted into another section of the magazine, away from the longer back-to-back adolescence pieces.

“Tag” by Kevin Dolgin is not a game played by children, but something else entirely. The male narrator meets a woman in Paris and they play an elaborate sexual rendezvous game where they give each other clues which set up the time and place of their next meeting. They travel the world meeting up to have sex. This game has rules, but one rule is missing, the one that relates to how the game ends. On the surface this is a glamorous story with its refined and exotic locations. There’s no doubt the story is well written and entertaining. I didn’t connect so much with the characters, but ‘Tag’ brings a different atmosphere and voice to issue 5 after the three previous works.

‘Men Don’t Apologize’ by Xujun Eberlein is set in the writer’s native China. The main character is the daughter of a powerful man but the Cultural Revolution reverses his fortunes temporarily and brings about his public humiliation, and an embarrassing incident for his daughter involving a local boy whose father has now risen above hers. As an adult she finds a work placement at a local bus factory. The boy who once tormented her is now a famous TV personality who sees her on her way to work and begins to turn up at her workplace. He’s determined to court her but she’s more interested in finding an old teacher who once helped her. The ending of this story has a nice touch of humour.

There’s a lot of information fed into this story about Communist China. But there’s enough entertainment in the plot and characterisation to prevent the story getting bogged down in factual detail. In fact, ‘Men Don’t Apologize’ was one of my favourite stories in this issue. It’s extremely well written and nicely structured.

’Peck’ by Jack Smith is one of two shorter pieces. A child may or may not be abducted at the beginning of this story. There’s an ambiguity about this one which didn’t really work for me - at least not the ending. What comes before that is fine. ‘The Lesson’ by Michelle Hoover focuses on a girl with deteriorating sight. There was a line in this one which I particularly liked: “… she would drop her head into her hand, as if she were remembering someone or hiding from him, attempting to close the memory away in her fist.”

’Long Words’ by Robert Boswell is another of my favourites. There’s a thread of humour in this story which sees a couple splitting up. The woman lives in the shadow of the past, and her mother’s legacy. The back story of her childhood weaves through the more wryly observed present. The writer successfully balances the dark and light aspects of this story, exhibiting a deft and witty style that manages to dig deep.

’Salamander’ by Jay Merill has an omniscient narrator and focuses on two triangles - the one that frames the story, a brother and two sisters - and the triangle of the central section which involves three neighbours. This was an extremely strong story and yet there was also something a bit unsatisfying about it - I felt as if I wanted to know a bit more about the back story involving the siblings. I also wondered if the story was told from the best angle - by the end it felt a bit like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Nevertheless, it’s a good piece of writing.

The narrator of ‘Better Homes And Gardens’ by Paul Toth has just come out of prison but seems to be someone who doesn’t know where he belongs. He returns to the prison and stands gazing at it to the surprise of the guard. Ultimately, he is a character who finds his place in a different kind of underworld from that of crime. This is a dialogue driven story, and moves along at a good pace.

Linda Mannheim’s ‘Turbulence’ has a more complicated structure, with different threads running through it, one of which relates to the narrator’s experiences with a lover in Nicaragua. This is an ambitious story that didn’t quite work for me when it came to the bits relating to the narrator’s sister. It was almost as if too many threads were competing against one another, but it might also have been a structural issue, or simply the way the sister’s thread was handled. Otherwise the story is up to the high standards of Night Train prose, and I liked the central part of the narrative in particular.

’Unfriendly Cashiers’ by Steve Almond is a tiny flash fiction piece that takes a swipe at the smiley service industry mentality, celebrating instead miserable check out assistants. I have a lot of sympathy for the writer’s viewpoint.

’Heavy Lifting Required’ by David Musgrove is located in Alaska. The central character has moved here after the death of his wife. There are few jobs around, but he manages to find work as a carer. The daughter of one of his client’s hits on him, and he finds himself on the run from the police. This is a story full of lonely people. The harsh landscape contributes to this. Musgrove draws his characters well and leaves us with an ambiguous ending. Another good piece of writing.

The paranoia of the modern urban commuter is the subject of Gail Louise Siegel’s ‘Rails’ where the female character is aware of the ease with which a terrorist attack can be mounted. She thinks of the bombed rail passengers in Madrid. This is a completely believable character story / vignette.

In ‘The Call’ by Hasanthika Sirisena, Sri Lankan Dunstan gets a long distance call from the NYPD to say his niece, Sopi, has been murdered by her husband. Dunstan and his aunt presided over Sopi’s arranged marriage while Helen, Dunstan’s wife, had suspicions about the young man Sopi was being asked to wed. These things come back to haunt the characters, and Dunstan journeys to New York. Sopi is something of a mystery to him - he can’t remember her face properly. Some people back home suspect she brought her murder on herself by cheating on her husband, but as one of Sopi’s neighbours notes, it’s always the woman who gets blamed. Sopi’s fate is a sad one, and she remains an enigma right until the end. The reader never does get a sense of who she was.

A Greek island is the setting for Antonios Maltezos’s post-apocalyptic story “The Last Woman”. Everyone is dying or dead from some strange plague. A young woman escapes to the mountain home of an old couple who take her in. They warn her not to go to certain parts of the island. In time they die, and she is left alone, except for a presence she feels. There is someone else alive, a young man. But this story has no garden of Eden ending. ‘The Last Woman’ like all the fiction in Night Train is well written, but for me, it didn’t work so well. Another reader might feel very differently.

’Walking on Water’ by Terry Dehart is a flash fiction piece dealing with someone diagnosed with terminal cancer. The character goes water-skiing, determined to make the best of things. Dehart packs a lot into this brief story.

’How the Universe is Going to End’ by John Warner seems to be heading in one direction and ends up someplace else. I like the way this story concludes, overturning reader expectations and assumptions, while addressing how life doesn’t quite turn out they way we imagine it will.

An interview with Amy Bloom follows the fiction. I’m not familiar with this writer’s work at all, but the interview makes for interesting reading. As well as all this and the Petaluma article, there are extensive bios at the back where writers give an insight into how they came to write their works. Night Train is one of the best literary journals I’ve come across, and in this particular roundup ranks alongside Banipal, Glimmer Train and TriQuarterly. Anyone interested in this magazine can read some of the stories in this issue online at the magazine’s site.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.