On "Rex" by Bonnie Nadzam (5162 words) ***

I'm not sure what's going on in this story. I'm sure I could parse it out if I read it three or four times. There's something about a daughter being raped--and possibly killed--something about a trip to Batan, something about a ten-year-old prostitute, about welding, about men, about voyeurism, about bars and drinking and spilled coffee, about a magazine and airplanes and a phone conversation with a wife in a troubled marriage. And there's something--a lot of things, in fact--about Jessie. It's one of those stream of consciousness experiments. And it's one of those great vomitings of words across a page that somehow add up to more than the sum of their parts, to excess, to word brilliance. I'll never see welding as quite the same again. Read the story here at Mississippi Review.