The sketch of the fruit bat is pretty good. And the anteater. The bear looks like a dog with a shirt on, and the buffalo doesn’t really look like anything. The pig has fangs. On the last page of the mag there’s a space for you to draw your own pictures. Of the poems by Leslie Ann Cass, “Flight of the Meat Bees” — in which bees take pieces of a dead person back to their hive to be, “Reconstruced/To be fed to the queen/Along with Big Mac dumpster-patties” — is the best. There’s a story about a guy who gets dumped by his girlfriend and, when he finds himself, “living under a seriously black bad-mood-cloud,” he steals a toucan. Then wonders why the bird gets pissed off when he tries to feed it Fruit Loops. It screeches at him continuously and he tries everything to get it to stop. He puts it in a cage, tries to teach it to talk, and finally, after it rips his cheek off, he tries to shoot it. Instead of killing it though, he blows a hole in his balcony door and the bird flies off. There’s a magnificent story about guys in canvass shoes who worship someone named Oswald, “the palest and most impotent man on earth,” who wears, “his massive grey hip-waders,” everywhere he goes. Wonderful tales that make no overt effort to go anywhere. Vanilla Crow is like “a relator’s idea of a ride home…Not quick or direct by any means.”
lit zine / publisher: Derek Fairbridge / main creator: Derek Fairbridge (editor) / $1.50 / 403 Nelson Ave., Penticton, B.C., V2A 2L3