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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Zuma
When you get to your father's bedroom, you see Dad shaking like a freshly fumigated bug. Your brother is by his side on the phone, his face red and sweaty, like when he's been skateboarding all day.
April 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Humomism
In my writing class last Thursday, Cara said it’s a shame that the word humane has human in it, as if only humans had compassion. Then Beth said it’s a problem that human has the word man in it. So we were trying to find another word. Dan suggested “humom.” Because, at our best, we are all like mothers. So maybe that can be the name of our movement: humomism.
April 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Thievery
I was sure I'd heard our front gate squeal and rattle. We live on a tree-lined Chicago street where 6 AM on Sunday is the time for arriving home from the night shift or heading out to the early shift or, in the case of a very few early risers, walking a dog.
April 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Conversations With A Banana Spider
The smell of wild honeysuckle was everywhere, and the mango trees sagged with the weight of their fruit. I’d often hear the ripe ones fall to the street with a heavy, wet thud, or else bang off the metal roofs of outbuildings where homeless wanderers sometimes slept. This abundance of fruit made Loreto seem like an impossible place to starve, yet I saw a few souls who looked like they were trying their best to do just that. Was it legal, I wondered, to simply reach up and pull a ripe mango from someone else’s tree? Being a foreigner with money, I didn’t need to find out.
March 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Wattle
Abner read somewhere that it’s a resonant gesture to clone an old apple tree. You plant the clone near the original tree, and there they are, old and new, same and different, together.
March 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Ditch
This is the part of the story where someone tells me, You couldn’t save him. He had to save himself. Every time I hear something like that, I want to scream.
March 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Tart
After the massage I take myself to lunch. I eat a passion fruit tart. It’s delicious—sour and sweet both in perfect balance. Its perfection makes me angry. The filling is bright yellow. I watch my fork pick up the yellow and the crumbs. I am too focused on this tart. I wonder if I have been worrying so much that the worry muscles in my brain are now broken, permanently sharpened to a point of attention that is useless now, an ambulance siren for no one.
March 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
February 2025
This Is Hard To Write
I’m learning that crying is what it is, not bad, not good. And that dementia is what it is, not bad, not good. And anything can happen in anyone’s life, anywhere, anytime. Not bad, not good.
February 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
After All This
When twenty first graders were slaughtered and the country responded without a national gun-buyback program, national red-flag laws, universal background checks, a national wait period, a gun registry, an assault-weapons ban, disarming all domestic abusers, ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers, instituting mandatory yearly classes for gun ownership (list all your ideas that could help here), we became complicit.
February 2025
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Taking Shelter
I like to be reminded—need to be reminded—that my father was young once, that he had a crush on a girl in his one-room schoolhouse near Ladies Chapel, that he looked forward to helping his aunt Alverdia tend bees or pick watermelon from the large patch near the creek, his feet smeared red with clay.
February 2025
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