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Winter 2008 • Vol. XXX No. 1 • Fiction |

The Visual Equivalent of Pain

How many times have I heard some guy say, “I want to kill the bitch”?

For sure, more than I can count on my fingers. But not lately, not since I turned forty and had fewer friends who got drunk and ranted. So it sounded ominous when Frank Wertz, fifty-one years old, made that declaration less than two hours into drinking nothing but beer, long before he had the excuse of his brain turning to mush.

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Gary Fincke
Gary Fincke's latest collection of personal essays, The Darkness Call, won the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose and was published by Pleiades Press. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction and the Ohio State Journal Prize for Poetry, he has published thirty-two books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.

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