Michelle Cacho-Negrete | The Sun Magazine

Michelle Cacho-Negrete

Michelle Cacho-Negrete lives in Portland, Maine, where she works with writing students online and in person. Her essay “Stealing” appeared in the anthology Best of the Net 2011.

— From November 2013
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Chanel Suit

It was during a search for jeans for my sons that I saw the gray suit hanging by itself like a fine work of art. A prominent sign identified it: COCO CHANEL SUIT. Even in the midst of the store’s usual castoff opulence, a Chanel suit was an unexpected find.

November 2013
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What You Think About

You hang up the cellphone and think about how the surgeon cleared his throat again and again as he asked how you were, then said, “I have the best news of bad news,” and you think how you knew what he was going to say as soon as you heard his voice.

September 2009
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Stones

I strode impatiently over the drenched grass, rattling in my hand two rough stones that we’d brought from Maine, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of leaving stones on the grave to show that we had visited. They were striped rocks: white, gray, and black layers of prehistoric past.

April 2009
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Tell Me Something

Everything of my brother’s fits on a couple of shelves: boxes of records, books, a few photographs. When you’re killed at eighteen, you don’t leave much behind.

August 2008
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Season Of My Grandfather

My mother, my stepfather, my five-year-old brother, and I lived in a sunny three-room tenement in Brooklyn, New York. The walls of our foyer were lined floor to ceiling with my mother’s books, and I read as many as possible, entering a trancelike state in which everything else floated on the edges of my awareness.

April 2008
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

In My House

When I first heard that President George W. Bush would be making an Earth Day speech at Laudholm Farm, a sixteen-hundred-acre nature reserve near my home in Wells, Maine, it seemed as if a tainted bubble of exploitation had descended on the place, something especially unclean and dishonest.

January 2008
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

To Look For America

There it is: I’m American. I flush a deep, hot red. Shame rises up in me so strongly I can barely breathe. How did this happen? How did it become shameful to be an American?

March 2007
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Road To Linzhi

We’re marooned in a bowl of mountains on the road to Linzhi, Tibet. Unlike the mountains of home, which are settled, full-grown, and staid, the Himalayas are brazen, thrusting themselves into the sky. These mountains are an epic in the making. These mountains humble us: forty-four American and European scientists and their spouses, led by a Tibetan guide, Sangkar, who has lived here all his life.

December 2006
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Steeplechase

Evenings, the boardwalk was crowded with refugees from the hot city. Neon blazed, and loud music exploded from every arcade. The aroma of hot dogs, hamburgers, beer, and knishes mingled with the salt-scented breeze. It was the first time I’d known the expansive luxury of the open sky curving to the horizon.

December 2005
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

And Passion Most Of All

Her eyes were hard. I knew then that she was going to be relentless and wouldn’t give up until I acknowledged the truth.

April 2005
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

On Terror

She tries to catch her breath, takes tissue after tissue from my box. I give her a glass of water, and we do some deep-breathing exercises. I tell her to go slowly. I assure her that the past is over, although I know it is a lie. The past is alive. It is with us every moment, our lives slim transparencies between past and present.

December 2004
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Beauty Of Second Avenue

The foyer was home to my mother’s books but a place of exile for my brother and me. Around the time I was eleven and he seven, my mother began banishing us, singly, to the foyer without dinner in fits of unpredictable, unfathomable rage.

October 2004
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