Category: Creative NonFiction

by Jill McCabe Johnson The thud of a suitcase upstairs, sink faucet turned on and off, a muffled voice lilting in question. As I lie awake in our bed and breakfast, the sounds of life—of other’s lives—hold comfort. They inhabit sequestered rooms, where unmasked breath can warm the nooks and pockets. Their voices curve around […]

by Rose Strode Water is easy to drink. Too easy, considering it’s not easy to find. Once found, one must consider its source. Water’s powerful, shaping the landscape through which it flows, yet also vulnerable, retaining in itself particles of all the places it’s been. The first time I considered water, I was twenty-seven. The […]

by Leah Claire Kaminski Crazy Snail and Backseat Driver by Igor Kasev I eat my first mushrooms in traffic with my sister on Seven Mile Bridge. I’m a small notch in the metal spine of cars cooking over the hot sea. Over the old bridge running next to us like a mouth missing teeth, a […]

by Ploi Pirapokin During the summer, after my first year of graduate school, I borrowed my father’s Royal Bangkok Sports Club card to pay for two papaya shakes. My friend and I gulped them down as the waiter held the brown card up⁠—eyes darting between the tiny headshot of my wrinkled father and my oops-expression⁠—then […]

by Sayuri Ayers Behind my house, Alum Creek swells with the March rains. Parting the bare branches of overgrown pawpaws, I walk to the edge of the bank. A birch leans into the water, its stripped branches stark as bared bone. Below the steep drop, the creek swirls. Its current bears Columbus, Ohio’s debris: crumpled […]

by Nada Samih-Rotondo While CNN broadcast the Iraqi army’s invasion of Kuwait City to the world, I was trying to tune into my morning cartoons. That morning in August, I struggled to find a working station on our newly defective television for my cartoons. My mother received a long distance phone call from her younger […]

by Vanessa Remmers Afterward, they ate gummy bears. They grabbed them from the bag, and pinched the spongy bodies. They did not eat them whole. Remember how we would not eat them whole? one says to another, twenty years later, over filet mignon at the Petroleum Club reunion dinner. Remember? How they ate them little […]