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Becky Mandelbaum

Becky Mandelbaum

Becky Mandelbaum has been attacked by an owl. She is the author of two books: Bad Kansas, a collection of short stories, and The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals, a novel. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

The Telephone Mode

I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.

November 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Gift Shops of the American Wild

The Paradise Inn sits at 5,400 feet on the south slope of Mount Rainier, the highest peak in Washington State. Up here the air is thin and crisp, the colors are saturated, and every breeze carries an aroma of pine and the trill of birdsong. Even immersed in such concentrated beauty, my heart aches. For the hundredth time today I think of Jack, a fellow writer in the graduate program I recently completed. We bonded over our love of books and our homesickness for the Midwest.

June 2024
Fiction

Emotional Morons

Kayla and I were not friends, so when she called me out of the blue, on a blistering July morning, to ask if I wanted to join her and her dad on the lake for the day, it was like NASA calling to invite me to the moon.

July 2022
Fiction

Goodbye, Sugar Land

I was still exploring my power to hurt others and was continually surprised by how potent a single sentence could be. I watched my mother’s face waver and then crack open.

October 2019
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