Issue 51 / January 2016
Nonfiction
New Year’s Day 2016
January 18, 2016
by Abigail Thomas• 12 Comments
by Abigail Thomas• 12 Comments
Feeling better because I looked up the verb to watch in the dictionary and its root is to awaken which isn’t sinister and since I was trying to figure out why it creeps me out so much that an old boyfriend is watching Latvian girls on his computer who do what he asks and answer all...
Nonfiction
Night
January 18, 2016
by Jericho Parms• 5 Comments
by Jericho Parms• 5 Comments
On Sunday I crawled under a ladder while trying to hang curtains with a drill, in an old house that was newly mine, during a winter that just wouldn’t quit. One of the thin iron rods had fallen from my grasp, its hardware scattering like marbles beneath the bed. On my knees, pawing like a...
Nonfiction
A Brief Atmospheric Future
January 18, 2016
by Matthew Gavin Frank• 3 Comments
by Matthew Gavin Frank• 3 Comments
If we’re to believe the neuroscientist Professor Marcus Pembrey, from University College London, who concluded that “Behaviour can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory…phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders… [even] sensitivity to [a] cherry blossom scent…” then the pigeon knows of its ancestors’...
Nonfiction
Some Childhood Dreams Really Do Come True
January 18, 2016
by Beth Ann Fennelly• 9 Comments
by Beth Ann Fennelly• 9 Comments
Then I wanted to be a mermaid. But first, I needed the tits and the hair. Hair long enough that it fell in naked curves down my naked chest while I lounged on a rock, luring sailors with my song. Now I have tits and hair down to my ass. You’re probably expecting me to...
Nonfiction
Success and Prosperity
January 18, 2016
by By Chen Bouiyan, translation by Jennie Chia-Hui Chu• 1 Comment
by By Chen Bouiyan, translation by Jennie Chia-Hui Chu• 1 Comment
A car hit our dog Prosperity not too long ago. The vet took out the staples in his body recently, and it looks like Prosperity has his health back. Prosperity’s big brother is Success. No one remembers when we started to call Success Success, as my grandma named him. (Grandma’s last name is Zheng, same...
Nonfiction
Safety
January 18, 2016
by Jeff Gundy• 2 Comments
by Jeff Gundy• 2 Comments
I’ve lived my life in safe places, not at risk except for boredom and its associated disorders. The farm was safe, my room upstairs with my brother, the pale kitchen where we ate, maple cupboards my dad built, and the plastic table we inherited and still fold our clothes on today. I have no tales...
Nonfiction
Meme 11
January 18, 2016
by Dave Madden• No Comments
by Dave Madden• No Comments
I was cast as one of two narrators in the kindergarten play. Hutchison Elementary, 1983. The Tawny, Scrawny Lion, adapted from a Little Golden Book. The script was ditto’d in landscape format, and sent home weeks in advance; the lavender lettering Mrs. Bunting was careful to highlight for each student. Tiny Erica Kuzma was Narrator 2....
Nonfiction
“La Vuoi una Mano?”
January 18, 2016
by Renée E. D’Aoust• 6 Comments
by Renée E. D’Aoust• 6 Comments
The old man is wearing a black trench coat and holding it wide open, showing a shriveled, pasty penis. “Cazzo,” I say, staring out the train window. Cappella Agnuzzo is one of the few stops on the single-track Ferrovia Lugano-Ponte Tresa line where a passing loop allows two trains traveling in opposite directions to pull...
Nonfiction
Blue
January 18, 2016
by Maggie Pahos• 4 Comments
by Maggie Pahos• 4 Comments
Years ago, Dad, you asked me at midnight to come outside. I followed you—of course I did—out of our house, into the humid dark. My feet brushed against the cool lick of grass, my hair lay still against my face in the unmoving night. Crickets whispered. A car on 55th Street hummed as you handed...
Nonfiction
The Woods Are Going to Close
January 18, 2016
by e.v. de cleyre• 3 Comments
by e.v. de cleyre• 3 Comments
Mother unzipped our snow pants and clumps of sawdust fell to the floor. Before that, the bloodhounds sniffed us, and their handlers asked us where we had been. The police needed to retrace our tracks, to know that the hounds had been on our heels. Before that, the man offered us a ride in his...
Nonfiction
I Wonder What Happens Next
January 18, 2016
by Leanna Petronella• 2 Comments
by Leanna Petronella• 2 Comments
Sister, you already know what I am going to say. We leave our mother’s womb together. Our stomachs flower brownly into diapers. Screaming from our cribs, we watch colorful bears bounce across television screens. It is right that a bear should have a rainbow on its stomach. It is right for that stomach to radiate...
Nonfiction
Close to Shore
January 18, 2016
by CB Anderson• 5 Comments
by CB Anderson• 5 Comments
In the months after his wife left, Thomas learned to cook. He matched socks and shopped for hair ties. His life, a labyrinth of small necessities, was not what he’d imagined. But, love. The girls need me, he told friends when they asked him to fish or hunt with them. On Friday nights he built...
Nonfiction
They Say
January 18, 2016
by Hayley LeMay• 4 Comments
by Hayley LeMay• 4 Comments
I’d take him home in a minute, they say. At the mall, the grocery store, while standing in line at the bank. When you finally reach the teller she says, I hope he is your deposit. Your baby smiles shyly, blinks his blue eyes and buries his face in your neck. Then they want him...
Nonfiction
Foundation
January 18, 2016
by Paul Crenshaw• 5 Comments
by Paul Crenshaw• 5 Comments
“That foundation there,” my father said, pointing as he drove, “was once a little bungalow that belonged to a woman named Betsy Williams.” He slowed so I could see the foundation, the cracked rocks hidden among the wild onion and witchweed. A sycamore grew where the living room had been. We were driving through rolling...
Nonfiction
Snapshot
January 18, 2016
by Sharry Wright• 4 Comments
by Sharry Wright• 4 Comments
I still cannot descend a steep flight of stairs or sit while someone leaves the table to fetch a camera without thinking of that Christmas fifty years ago, right after Great Uncle Earl had said the blessing in his Baptist deacon’s voice, when Great Aunt Velma (seventy-two at the time, my mother’s mother’s sister) got...