We're grateful for the remarkable talent of our Ravings contributors, and for your kind and encouraging e-mails. Please, don't hang back! We're always on the prowl for new fiction, poetry, plays, and essays from emerging writers. If you have a text, image, or feature idea you'd like to share, please let us hear from you. If you're simply mad as hell, and feel like lashing out blindly at the first hyperlink that comes along, tell it to The Hand. Enjoy!

Tight Shorts brings you contemporary flash fiction from promising new writers. In this installment, E.G. Swarthout recounts a chance encounter with an intriguing English spinster in exotic Morocco.

Nancy Edelman returns with the third in a series of South Beach Plays, celebrating the exotic human fauna of South Miami Beach. Following in the nanoplay tradition, Ms. Edelman's playful offering, Einstein on the Beach Towel, invites the question, "What the heck happened before the curtain opened?" Her other South Beach Plays, Seaweed and How Do You Know You're Happy?, premiered in earlier editions of Ravings.

While the American press searches for damning statements in the President's 2003 State of the Union adress, freelance writer John Markovich finds compelling evidence for the end of Civilization. Like, lighten up, dude, you're bumming us out!

This is my Cuba. The Cuba of a first-generation American whose experience of the island is mediated by faded photographs and oral histories. It’s Cuba distorted by Hollywood’s lens, then brought into sharp focus by the music of Ernesto Lecuona. It’s the Cuba of the diaspora in Miami and New York; the I Love Lucy Cuba; the Cuba of newsreels showing Fidel waving his arms emphatically as he delivers one of his infamous five-hour harangues. If we visited the island together, you wouldn’t know her from my descriptions. But I think I would recognize her, ambling along, bearing the marks of the violence that one idea can do to another.

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We're very pleased to premiere Tom Bradley's A Jataka Tale. The Jataka is a book of the Pali Canon containing 547 short texts about the previous incarnations of the Buddha and the actions of his disciples. These stories were transmitted orally for many centuries before being written down. Tom Bradley's contemporary retelling of an ancient Jataka tale plays on the conflicting iconography of the crow — an animal that's been used to represent both great wisdom and great foolishness.

A new X Interview 4 U! Victoria Dawson, freelance writer and frequent contributor to Smithsonian Magazine, goes mano a mano with Dr. Rorschach. Is this an insensitive exploitation of one of the venerated tools of the psychological profession? OK, OK, we'll take the rap; the rest of you, just enjoy …

They lived; they loved; they're probably all dead. We spent many happy hours poring over the images, words, and objects that people collected in their scrapbooks many years ago. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

La Doña serves up some of the sauciest, most tongue-in-cheek horoscopes you're likely to find anywhere. If you're looking for questionable advice, then you've come to the right place. La Doña is the only Cuban astrologer who gives Walter Mercado a run for his money.

Sharpen your no. 2 pencils and prepare for another brain-tingling assault on your corpus callosum.

Puzzle #3: What is harder than diamond, colder than absolute zero, and moves faster than the speed of light?  Send us your answers.

Solutions to Puzzle #2

We know there's a lot on your mind. Something about the way you click your mouse gives you away. Don't just sit there fuming: tell it to The Hand!