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Burning a Life: A Memoir of Smoking
by Kate Brandt My first writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer, spoke a truth I’ve always remembered: When we write, he said, we are burning a life. This is the story of ten years that changed me forever. It starts with a lit cigarette, and the story burns from there. Fall 1974: First Drag In 1974 I…
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This is All that Matters
by Amy Kiger-Wiliams My father is having seizures in his hospital bed. The white sheet is drawn up to his mid-chest, his tongue is hanging out the side of his mouth, and his hands and arms are twitching violently atop the sheet. He looks like he might be connected to an electrical current, but the…
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Apple Pie
by Lizzie Lawson The church kitchen. I’m at the rolling table surrounded by Catholic women my grandmother’s age. They peel and mix and roll and crimp. I flatten greasy dough into circles and throw them over open pies heaped with spiced apples and thick pats of butter. “Sometimes it feels good just to sit,” a…
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I love you
by Yen Ha It bothers her when her daughter jokes about how she never says the words I love you, first because she doesn’t speak English with her daughter, but also because she’s told her daughter many times over that her own parents never said I love you, not once in the forty years of…
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Marie Antionette Awaits the Guillotine
by Aleyna Rentz We are going to get better. Our yoga mats and workbooks and whispered mantras are going to fit like plaster into our broken places. There are nine of us, all girls, all survivors of our own secret traumas, sitting in a semicircle at the front of the university chapel, a long room…
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Small Rodents and Other Unwanted Things
by Heather Debel At night, we hear mice scratching in the walls, soft like they are sharing a secret. We feel the mice moving around us, hear their nails scuff across the rafters. The house is alive—little vibrations, fingers on a waxed car, door hinges. Liz thinks they are playing with her, some game of…
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So You May Sleep Again
I had been embroidering dead people on pillowcases for seven years before I ran into any trouble. It was a long, quiet stretch of time, during which I sat in the front room of my house at a small table, colored embroidery floss hanging around me like a web, stitching in the light of the…
