by Joel Carillet I was thinking about paradise, a word so often flippantly tossed around in churches and mosques, at Club Med resorts and on Norwegian cruise liners. The word could be powerful, but we’ve made it soft. It was 1:00 a.m., an hour before closing. A bottle of Heineken hung from my left hand […]

by Cameron M. Smith I knew that polar bears tore apart cabins every winter, so the first crunchthe sound of a large animal stepping carefully in deep snowstopped my breath. The second crunch tripped a dozen primal alarms, jolting me out of my sleeping bag to stand with the cocked 12-guage aimed at the door, […]

by Pamela Cordell Avis A modern tale of metamorphosis. I was at one of life’s crossroads, you know, the kind that either can or cannot divert you to a journey down an untraveled road. To move from L.A. to a tiny farming village in France was not an option, it was not even an idea. […]