Sybil Smith | The Sun Magazine

Sybil Smith

Sybil Smith lives in Vermont on the Connecticut River. She no longer feels the need to dazzle the world with her eloquence, and her greatest joy comes from taking care of a baby. She has been sober for more than eight years.

— From July 2017
Poetry

A Bright-Yellow-And-Black Bird

Right now there is a bright-yellow-and-black bird — / whose name I used to know / before I started taking this pill / called Lexapro

July 2017
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Endless Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

Having been a writer myself, I should admire her refusal to give up. Instead it makes me impatient with her. I believe M. lives in this myth of greatness in which her every habit or quirk is worthy of the autobiography being written in her head. It is the endless soliloquy of the interior paramour. Why do I believe this? Because I used to be that way myself.

April 2015
Fiction

Imogene’s Prayer

The pills are about the size of a bing-cherry pit in diameter and are a faint green color, like the eggs of some songbirds. On one side they have a deeply inscribed SZ, on the other, the number 789. They are Ritalin, the ten-milligram kind. Imogene knows them by sight because occasionally patients admitted to the psychiatric ward where she works as a nurse have containers of assorted pills, and she has learned to spot the ones that will get her high.

February 2014
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Two Wrongs

I have a rooster named Henry. He is what’s called a “Barred Rock,” which means he is white with black specks — or maybe black with white specks; it’s hard to tell. In his large and elegantly plumed tail he has one iridescent green feather. The spurs on the back of his legs are two inches long and come to sharp points. He has a brilliant red comb and red wattles and is, all in all, a handsome rooster. Sometimes parents who walk by on the road with their kids stop to admire him.

April 2011
Fiction

Free As Mr. B.

Dell is sitting at the nurses’ desk trying to read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, an assignment for her playwriting class. She can get away with this because the head honchos have all gone home, and evening has settled its lazy, sticky lassitude over the psychiatric unit.

March 2007
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Narrow Door

After I graduated from college, I worked as a prep aide at a large hospital. The prep aide was the person who went around each night and shaved patients for their surgery in the morning.

November 2005
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Boy Named Candy

Growing up, my siblings and I were aware of the enormous volume of water contained there. We knew that if the dam broke, our house would be swept away. It was tangible evidence of something we already felt: that we were never really safe.

April 2005
Fiction

God In The Smoke Room

There is a remnant of cool left to him. It’s in the way he combs his gray hair back with a little wave at the top. It’s in his gold neck-chains and the way he lights his Camel straights: one-handed, with an ornate Zippo lighter.

May 2004
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

God Is Not Dead, He’s Busy Making Sure Nicole Kidman Wins Another Oscar

I was walking on the ice. Let me say up front that I am not a foolish woman, that the ice was thick and I was dressed warmly. Let me add that, though I do drink too much on occasion, I wasn’t drinking that morning. I’d just had one teeny-tiny hit of good pot. That was all.

March 2004
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Sparrows In Purity Supreme

Sometimes when I’m sad, I become convinced that the world is going to end. And it will end someday, of course, but scientists give it billions of years yet. My “sense of impending doom” (the phrase psychiatrists use to describe this type of fear) is all out of proportion to what I know to be true.

February 2004
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