Tag: essay

This morning I found myself weeping, well, sobbing quietly while looking out the window as my toddler sat in my lap drinking milk and watching Bluey.... by Heather Wyatt ... Read More

Eight steps for developmentally editing characters. 1. Make a character list... 2. Identify frequency... 3. Code characters... 4. Amalgamate main characters... 5. Amalgamate secondary characters... 6. Give divine introductions... 7. Create character timelines... 8. Repeat ... Read More

Keeping Score by Kevin Brown In my neighborhood, my friends played sports year-round: football in the fall; basketball in winter and spring; and baseball in the summer. Most of the time, I’d join them, and we tried almost any sport we saw. After seeing field hockey in the early days ... Read More

I suppose when our conversation alights—precariously—on the topic of books and literature, and I benightedly ask you what your favorite novel is, you have to find something to plug up the gap. I am not unsympathetic. If someone were to ask me what my favorite hockey team was, I would probably just ... Read More

The live eel is just inches away from my face. I have to make a split-second decision whether or not to touch him, but as I have a live clam in hand, I skip my turn. Many of the others standing next to me do the same; we examine the ... Read More

“Like my hair?” my brother Brad asks, standing under the funeral home awning. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen him, five since we’ve talked. He smokes a cigarette while holding two bottles of Mountain Dew. An uneven shag of dark and gray, his hair is thick except for a ... Read More

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, each mourner deposits his symbolic shovel of earth, and the living say goodbye to the dead. The grave is filled in and the mourners file back to their cars, back to their lives, back to their loved ones. The dead are once again left ... Read More

I sit on the back porch, picking them out with my fingernails. They've embedded themselves between the layer of mesh and the layer of smooth nylon surface on the tops of my running shoes. From a distance they look like mud spatters, but they're clusters of organic torpedoes, hundreds of ... Read More

I return to that house, that night, that instant almost every day. It wasn’t late, not even quite 7:30—this we know from the call records on our cell phones—but it was cold and dark enough to feel much later. I arrived first. I could see that a light was on ... Read More

by Darlene PagánMy query starts with a search on sapling growth, more specifically, how many inches of growth are possible from seed in a five-year period, but a link pops up in red: How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight? With two young children of my own, I ... Read More

by Michael LevanAt eight weeks, she eats / less and less. Food doesn’t sound good to her, / it’s all Too complicated, she says, when he offers / to make her breakfast, lunch, dinner. She stops him / from saying the dishes out loud—veggie patty, plain noodles, a bowl / of ... Read More

His name was definitely Frank. Hers, I can’t say. But the roses—those, I will never forget. Waxy, fluorescent hybrids so extreme they tipped over from the burden of their outsized heads. Some might have called them garish but not me. I was dumbstruck by their loveliness—perhaps even suspicious. I wanted ... Read More

When I say that studying physics has amazed me with smallness, I don’t mean us, relative to the size of the universe. I mean the cells made from atoms made from protons and electrons and quarks that—guess what—are also waves. Then, as if all this talk about particles acting like ... Read More

by Evelyn Sharenov The first time I meet Annie*, she’s in the middle of a handstand push-up against the wall outside her room. Balanced on her palms, her back and legs straight up, she pushes off without a sound. A cropped tee falls to her bra line, exposing the bone ... Read More

... Read More

... Read More

... Read More