Anybody?
Have you ever stood on the front porch of your mother’s house, talking to your uncle, a big ol’ redneck with a big ol’ mustache, the kind of man who gets upset about police brutality and who doesn’t understand why those guys use their guns, because when he worked in …
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Lake Bird Flying
The first time I found you snacking in the closet on durian chips and mooncakes three years expired, you told me that we all have our secrets. You dropped a handful of red and gold candy in my hands—barely big enough to hold it all—that you had stolen from some …
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A Small Part
The star is beautiful. No, beautiful is too simple. She is ethereal. She is moonlight, and her rugged co-star is a snow-capped mountain. No—she’s an orchid, and he’s a bend in a lazy river. You are an extra seated across the plane’s aisle. If the leads are moonlight and mountains …
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Mom’s Night Out
It’s been a long week, and we’re all excited to be out. Excited to be eating our dinner without a small human on our laps. Excited to not be needed for a few hours. Excited to be among friends. One of us has put in fifty hours at the office …
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Essay One for English 101 by Angela Abaya Ono
Have you ever seen a walrus fall from the sky? Forced to find space on a crowded melting glacier, the walrus scales steep ice cliffs. Unfortunately, they have poor depth perception. Seeing the ocean, they leap from the bluff, blubbery bodies cartwheeling through the air before plummeting into the sea …
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I Retrospect Nature
This piece was shared with us by Amy Losak, daughter of the author, Sydell Rosenberg (1929-1996). While Rosenberg’s short stories are works of fiction, they are loosely based on her life as the daughter of immigrant Eastern European Jews in New York City. I was a child of the …
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Zephyr
SJ boards the California Zephyr at 7:03 PM in Denver. It’s her first time aboard the train, and it overwhelms her. She’s never experienced anything like climbing onto the second floor of a giant, movable building and being welcomed by an impossibly long hallway of large, royal-blue seats. She stows …
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Sea Change
After slumping into their late twenties, the girls only ever got together for wedding and baby-related events. Their fiancés and husbands and soon-to-be-children gave them perfect cause to reunite and celebrate. It was good to catch up, but more than that, they reveled in slipping back into younger and freer …
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The Sound of Emily
Drained long ago, the gray pit fills with layer upon layer of soggy leaves, twigs, plastic bags, pop cans. Leading into that abyss is a fiberglass slide, emerging now like a ghost in the low morning light, taunting him with its unfaded aquamarine, its phony tropicality. From the window, it’s …
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But You Didn’t
Was it terrible? That time in the tiny market across from St. Bartholomew’s, where kids would stop before school for Tastykake pies and licorice, the morning when you and Nick Cane, rushing into the store just minutes before the bell rang, found the owner stretched out on the floor behind …
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