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patrolling the rail yards, and scurrying—seeing and unseeing—through the bleak labyrinthine streets of the night city. There is an occasional ominous rumble, underfoot or overhead, and the distant wail of sirens can be heard, the crumpling of crashing cars, the muffled kerwhumps of dull explosions. Also, from time to time, never far away, the echoey hammering of heels on pavement, which causes the men to pull up short, cock their ears if they have them, turn toward the clocking heels, then continue, redirected, when they stop. The men are headless or else they wear black fedoras, brims pulled down over lit cigarettes; they are wet and ripply if flat like cutout men or bloated if not, and all now carry silvery handguns in their black-gloved hands. Remotely, shots can be heard, the whine of ricocheting bullets. Sometimes a man falls clutching his chest, but after a moment rises again to continue his mazy pursuit. Drawn by the pulsating footsteps, the men converge upon a small barren lot from which lamped streets radiate damply in all directions. She appears out of the ubiquitous shadows, first in one of the wet streets, then another, the men firing upon her wherever and whenever she is seen. She appears in two streets at once, dually approaching the men in the empty lot, then three, five, eight, all of them. There is a rattle of gunfire in all directions, the glittery shattering of glass, the dull thuck of bullets striking bodies; she is fragmenting, disintegrating in all the streets, while the men—flat, full, hatted, headless—topple, one after another, surrendering their small measure of dignity to the black city streets. She walks, whole again, among their sad crumpled bodies, glass crunching underfoot; then, as the streetlamps brighten briefly, only to fade again, she disappears into the descending night. The men are all dead. No, they are not. They rise once more, step under streetlamps, light cigarettes in cupped black-gloved hands, tug their hat brims down if they have them, adjust their black silk ties in their gleaming shirt collars, cock their ears. In the silence, the clocking heels resume.

Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept
by Katherine Karlin
    My school librarian was first to tell me about Jean Seberg. Miss Breedlove, her cat-eye specs suggesting a whiff of counter-cultural recalcitrance, recognized in me a sullen fellow soul, and she pulled a book from the shelf to show me: here was Jean on The Ed Sullivan Show , and here were Jean’s bewildered parents; here was Jean arriving in Paris; here was Jean burned at the stake. Jean was from Marshalltown, a Saturday morning bike ride from our town of Edna, the prettiest girl in Iowa, and of all the pretty girls in America she was chosen to play Joan of Arc. She lived in Paris and she married a famous writer. She was a movie star. And you can’t blame Miss Breedlove for withholding the rest—the dead child; the wicked COINTELPRO harassment; Jean’s own boozy, blubbery decline; the death in a white Renault, obstructively parked in a Paris alleyway, her body in such an advanced state of decrepitude it had to be scooped, not lifted, into the gendarmes’ body bag. The librarian wanted to show me there was life beyond Edna.
    And I was hooked. Unbelievable that the same late fifties Paris that produced Brigitte Bardot—that portable mattress, who spent her days curled up and waiting—also gave us Jean Seberg, darting around the arrondissements in her beep-beep Citroën, leaving her lover at the curb, lightly adjusting the rearview mirror with a “Sorry, darling,” and a revealing flick of the wrist. Lithe and slightly androgynous. She was as much a product of Iowa as of Paris. Here from the humus with the corn and soy and swine she grew, her Nordic blood the same as mine.
    I left Edna the day after I graduated from high school and today I am back, twenty years older. Early mornings I hear from across town the hoarse shriek