Category: Nonfiction

Lorraine Hanlon Comanor “We in some measure shape the events that befall us just as surely as we are shaped by them.”  —Mark Slouka, Arrow and Wound       I’m sitting in a theater—when or where I’m unsure—watching Nicholas and Alexandra, a film I thought to be in black and white, but since confirmed was in color.…

By Chloe Willows It didn’t start with water. It started with something much more ordinary, a routine document, an approved decision, a quiet human error wrapped in well-meaning intentions. But the world is not made of our intentions. It is made of consequences. And water, being the most patient force on Earth, knew how to…

By Wasima Khan By the time the second tower fell, the world had already changed. The air itself had thickened, as if something massive had broken in the sky and drifted across the Atlantic to settle even in the damp autumn streets of our Dutch seaside city. I was a teenager then, old enough to…

by J.M.C. Kane House RulesThe psychologist says, “Play naturally,” as if anything natural can happen under fluorescent lights with a woman holding a clipboard six feet away, timing something.There are house rules here. Look up when prompted. Imitate on cue. Stack, don’t sort. Points deducted for gradients.My son kneels in front of the toy bin.…

by Brandyce Ingram       “I am dying.” His comically obvious words were punctuated by syllables like the title of a film, perhaps in an effort to convince himself that it was all a show. Just another climax to just another movie. He worshipped outlaws, the broad-shouldered with hidden holsters, Bogarts and Waynes, high rollers and sharpshooters,…

Kirby Michael Wright A Snapshot of My Grandmother’s Life       Brownie’s on horseback. The ratta-tat-tat of a seaplane spooks her mare, causing them to charge into roadside kiawe. Brownie pulls back hard on the reins. She chose Bella over the jeep because riding makes her feel mighty. She’s a hair over five feet, but up here…

by Afsheen Farhadi       Our fifth-grade math class was getting new seating assignments, a ritual I didn’t understand and even now can only reason as some sort of prison tactic to ensure no alliances formed between students. It might also have been a social training exercise, evidenced by the fact that the rows of three alternated…

by Jean McDonough Monday, January 20, 2025 Dear Pablo Picasso, I am writing to inform you that patrons of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Spain, are now allowed to take selfies in front of Guernica, your Spanish Civil War painting that illustrates the terror bombing of a small Basque town on April 26, 1937—forgive…

by Mia Herman       I was thirteen when I first found out that I had scoliosis.      I didn’t even know what it was, really. Or what it meant. But after the first round of X-rays, the orthopedist said there was a forty percent chance I’d need back surgery.      “We’ll need to watch her,” she warned my mom like…

by Alice Hatcher       The sole survivor of the car crash that claimed the lives of three high school seniors, including my best friend’s cousin, D, was the last person to arrive for the funeral Mass. She arrived alone and took a seat at the back of the church, as if she had no claim to…