Issue 470 | The Sun Magazine

February 2015

Readers Write

Clothes

A suit of armor, a pair of blood-red high heels, a “cast on” butterfly dress

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

excerpted from
Letter From Birmingham Jail

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

By Martin Luther King Jr.
Quotations

Sunbeams

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.

Lin Yutang

The Sun Interview

The Hand We’re Dealt

Dalton Conley Asks Why Some People Get Ahead And Others Fall Behind

Only two measurable socioeconomic aspects of the parents really matter in predicting who succeeds: the parents’ education, which is the most important, and the family’s wealth, which is the second most important. By “wealth” I don’t mean how much the parents make a year. I mean net worth, including savings, property, and other financial resources.

By Ariane Conrad
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Your Wretched Correspondent

One of the most jarring parts of being in prison is waking up. Every morning it comes crashing down: the smells, the walls, the noise, the irrefutable fact of being trapped, and the memory of the events that led me here.

By Saint James Harris Wood
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Apartment 5

It was snowing that morning as we left for church, the white sky spitting flakes, enough to dust the car but not enough to cover the dirty snow at the side of the road, the bare patches of dead lawn. It was January in Ames, Iowa, when snow no longer has its fluffy Christmas novelty and simply becomes another cold, hard fact of life.

By Kelly Grey Carlisle
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

I’ll Never Bother You Again

The night Cole had followed my orders, I couldn’t believe it had worked: my taking the rifle, my telling him no. But I hadn’t discovered a bold, brave part of myself. It was nothing like that. What I’d discovered was that I could pretend to be someone I was not, and that people could be fooled by this, and that this could save my life.

By Heather Sellers
Poetry

Abortion

It’s the final moment — the tugging — / that’s the worst. A sucking deep within the pelvis, / where the body contracts as if / to cling to that tiny growth.

By SeSe Geddes