Issue 548 | The Sun Magazine

August 2021

Readers Write

Summer Jobs

Waiting tables, dyeing textiles, separating goats in heat

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

The Brahmin’s Son

One must find the source within one’s own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking — a detour, error.

By Hermann Hesse
Quotations

Sunbeams

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Sun Interview

Sent Away

Kenneth R. Rosen On The Troubled-Teen Industry

Some of these children do need help, but is this the right type of help? Over the years counselors have been charged with sexual abuse, physical abuse, and predatory behavior.

By Finn Cohen
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Brother’s Dinner With The President Of Sears

After this friend left, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I shut the door and fell to my knees, shaking and crying. I wished that my brother had been different. And I wished that I had been more forgiving and compassionate. I wished that everything between us had been different. I was on that floor for a while.

By Marc Inman
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Earth Perfected

But then I accidentally bite into one of the sour, acrid parts of quarantine. It’s easy to forget, when you live four hundred miles away, that your mother’s temper can be sparked by something as benign as family movie night or a run-in with the Hertz rental-car dealership.

By Emma Dale
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Taking Care

He sits on the mattress on the floor and unties his sneakers carefully. He spreads his laces to the sides of his shoes, as if they deserved respect.

By Ellery Akers
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

May You Bury Me

In three years, I thought, Lia’s chin would reach my crown. Or my crown would touch her chin? At some point the height order reverses itself, and then they leave you. Or you are overtaken by someone’s respiratory droplets in the produce section and you leave first.

By Kate Vieira
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

We Used To Have So Much To Say

I never told you this, because I was worried you would judge me too harshly, but the worms died. There, I said it. My loyal, silent kitchen-scrap eaters, my earthworms, all melted into a puddle of gore and oozing black death, right on our porch.

By Dorka Hegedus
Fiction

The Other Side Of The Mountain

This was what it was like to do the work she did, to recognize the person in the dying body and to stay with them — like bearing witness to light moving through wreckage, stubborn and pure.

By Ruby Shaw
Poetry

It’s Friday Afternoon In The Florida State Penitentiary And The Men Read Poetry

and Ronnie says Robert Hayden got / it right, a whipping be like that — “the face that I no longer / knew or loved” — damn, that’s it, right there and / Ronnie doesn’t blame his mama for beating him so bad, but / maybe she could have kept her pipe in the car and then maybe / he never would have ended up in a foster home

By Laurie Rachkus Uttich