On "The River" by Christine Sneed (6372 words) ***

Unfortunately the long-term unemployed are all too familiar these days. Sneed's tale is about one of them, a man who decides to take up his time preparing for a lawsuit to crack down on pollution. Meanwhile, his marriage is falling apart. And his daughter, whose point of view this story comes from, just wants things to stay as they are, but her efforts seem only to create more trouble. An interesting sidelight is the daughter's boyfriend, who has gone off to college, and like the parents in this story, the girl and her boyfriend no longer talk. In a sense, then, the story is about breakdowns of communication--for the daughter, the communication breakdown is in a passive, nonconfrontational manner that we see echo throughout all her interactions. Read the story here at TriQuarterly.