Postcard prose – Issue 13 | September 2011
Legacy
by Brooks Rexroat
I wake up with Khrushchev’s brass left eye staring me down. His look is angry, as if I’m the one who extracted half his nose. The desk clerk explains: moments after the ESSR collapsed, a mob stormed the room where the Premier had once slept. They brought clubs and hammers to room 14; left free to vandalize their own buildings as they saw fit, jubilant Estonians planned on hacking his commemorative bronze profile right off the wall. They pummeled his nose into submission and left a few nicks on his cheek before some falling plaster and a sagging windowpane taught them it was the bolts of his plaque that kept half the building vertical. Thwarted by Khrushchev, they took off toward lower hanging fruit and decapitated a stone Lenin at the riverside park.
“Say what you will about Soviets,” the clerk says. “They had a knack for utility.”
About the author
Brooks Rexroat lives and teaches writing in Cincinnati, Ohio, and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He spent the early months of 2010 learning why backpackers carry backpacks—not oversized suitcase, laptop satchel, and guitar—during a twenty-three country circuit of Europe that stretched from Ireland to Estonia and from Ukraine to Sweden. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Cleveland Review, The Montreal Review, and Weave Magazine.
Read our current issue, Issue 13 | September 2011:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
