A Literary Feast

The Farmer General > Articles by: John North Radway

Posts by John North Radway

The Conscience of the King

Posted on January 1st, 2017

It was never plausible and it was never smart. We did it anyway. We had to, I guess—we had run out of choices. It’s hard to remember how life felt before. I can only recall a sort of seething numbness. When everything goes that grey, you need to light something on fire. When it had finally begun and we couldn’t turn back, when the first real shots started flying and the air turned yellow with gas that stank like a mockery of the grave, all I could feel was an angry heaving that stretched from the pit of my stomach to the roof of my brain. I wanted to throw my head back and laugh, ecstatic, perverse. I wanted to yelp to all the…

Categories: Uncategorized

Going To Ground

Posted on October 14th, 2016

The mud under her boot soles rasped and rattled as though it had something to say but couldn’t remember how. It hadn’t rained since the last week in October, and the small river that ran through the cellar was little more than a trickle; along its banks lay little hillocks of earth neither wet nor damp. Dry mud, she thought as she dragged her feet through it, wishing she could kick off her boots and drag her toes through it. She imagined it would feel cool and crisp between her toes, like the scales of a fish that hasn’t been dead for long. She didn’t smile. The ceiling above her bounced like the underside of a drumhead, or at least she felt it did,…

Categories: Uncategorized

A Pie, We Suppose

Posted on June 10th, 2016

So consider this, please: a pie. I am holding it. It probably isn’t steaming but I’d like you to imagine that it is. I’m standing on a concrete stoop, or let’s call it a cement step because it doesn’t really have any of the dignity of a stoop which is something you should be able to sit on and look out at the world, and if you sat on this step you’d be straining your knees horribly and staring out at the broken window and the peeling paint across the street. It isn’t a nice neighborhood. It’s exactly the kind of neighborhood where the person I’m visiting ought to live.   And he does—at least I remembered that correctly. I find that a lot…

Categories: Uncategorized

Unconditional Surrender

Posted on May 14th, 2014

Summer rotted as summer always did, then shriveled into fall’s mummifications. Winter was sterile as moondust and had very little to do with blood and breath. Then spring came, or something like spring, and death walked the hills again. Mostly he watched it from his bedroom window. On his braver days he wandered out into the brunt of it to try to find an answer. Yesterday had been a braver day. He’d pulled on his rubber boots, slipped his lucky stone into his jacket pocket, and knocked three times on the porch railing, once for the past, once for the future, once for making it back again. Then he’d rubbed his teeth against one another and plunged into the wild, bloody field where robins ripped worms from the earth and late…

Categories: Uncategorized

The Grease Fire

Posted on March 17th, 2014

Like a meteor or some lesser Satan flung casually out of heaven, the cigarette, already stained a queasy brown by fingers that had rubbed, crushed, and worried it through four or five long minutes of staring at the second hand on a rusty watch face, flared one last time as it lapped the tainted air below the bar, arced through the lowest yard of booze fumes and boot stench, and died with an unheard fizzle on the damp and oily floor of the Dockyard. Billy thrummed the fingers of his right hand, now empty and nervous as the yellowish foam that clung to the inside of his pint glass. Whatever he’d been drinking looked like it had been through once already. He didn’t like to think which end they’d tapped…

Categories: Uncategorized

The Cream of Unknowing

Posted on September 30th, 2013

I’ll never see it again. I’m not sure it was there in the first place. It may have been a dream, or a summer night’s hallucination. On a lonely stretch of unmarked road somewhere outside of Montague, MA, walled in by dark trees and the whisking of bats overhead, I found, or thought I found, the world’s perfect soft serve.   If you’ve spent much time with your head inside a broken-down soft serve ice cream machine, you’ll understand that it is not a commodity often associated with perfection. Soft serve begins its life as an unwieldy sack of upsettingly viscous milk product weighing perhaps forty or fifty pounds. It sloshes like the innards of a giant squid as you drag it from the…

Categories: Uncategorized

What April Opens

Posted on April 18th, 2013

Already the sun has lapped the snowdrifts clean from the yard. Now it comes begging at the kitchen window, as though each pane   were a sheet of ice or the glaze on a cake to celebrate the end of something. Winter, maybe. But the soil rests untilled,   the seeds unplanted. I shield my eyes from the glare. It asks too much too soon: we are creatures of occasional darkness   still in the lull of frosts. We hunger, but not for green. The cellar offers last year’s roots and the ghosts of leeks   where one or two of Hades’ rivers cut through on their run to irrigate the cool, infertile bedrock. A month or two   will split the garden, bounty…

Categories: Uncategorized

Four Narrow Escapes

Posted on March 18th, 2013

A bottle of wine (so I’m told) can be an escape from the bite of late winter, from the grind of a nine-to-five job, from any of life’s little woes. The lush sun itself can burst forth when the cork pops out of the bottle.   I am not here to tell you about those wines.   A weekday evening found me in the discount wine section of a local grocery store with twelve dollars to spend on morbid curiosity. My simple mission: find and purchase several bottles of wine so unforgivably foul that the sheer thrill of tasting each would outweigh any contingent suffering. At $3.99 apiece I walked away with specimens from Chile, Italy, Spain, and what I can only assume is…

Categories: Uncategorized

Many Ingenious Lovely Things

Posted on February 14th, 2013

One of the saddest things about the end of the world—and I’m not being nearly as sarcastic as you think I am—is that one by one, every manufactured food product you used to love will cease to exist. Forever. I’m not talking about the eventual extinction of all things good and wholesome: a fell blight on kale, cutworms leveling the last tomato. An ecological catastrophe on this scale would flush us out with the rest of the bathwater. Mercifully. Because really, who wants to go living in a world without comforting brand-name garbage? Just months ago, nightmare fiction turned horribly real as the final Twinkies vanished from gas stations nationwide. It left me scarred. (You too?) An illusion of permanence, shattered. I didn’t even…

Categories: Uncategorized

Resolutions for Inveterate Foodies — 2013 Worksheet (please print)

Posted on January 21st, 2013

In the year 2013, I resolve to . . . (check at least 3)   ___ . . . be nicer to people who drink blended Scotch.   ___ . . . admit that sour cream can substitute for crème fraîche.   ___ . . . stop insisting that gastropubs are “over.”   ___ . . . learn to say “grass fed” without smugly narrowing eyes and smirking.   ___ . . . eat quinoa less ostentatiously.   ___ . . . accept that waitresses may not know the exact latitude & longitude of the dollar oysters’ home waters.   ___ . . . refrain from lecturing on yeast ecology every time someone misuses the word “ale.”         ___ . .…

Categories: Uncategorized