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It started with the mouse in the grass by the sidewalk, ants / crawling on its face. Aidan wanted to touch it. I drew him back / and held him. We talked about the gray fur and the tiny ants. He asked / if the mouse was going to go home to his mama and daddy. / No, I told him, the mouse won’t get to go home again.
By Donovan McAbeeOctober 2023She had read of various roughened skin patches that the Internet described as “scales,” but these were not those. These were not, in fact, human.
By Jen SilvermanOctober 2023A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
October 2023Sneaking cartoons, escaping into a sitcom, watching the election results
By Our ReadersOctober 2023We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done.
By Cheryl StrayedOctober 2023October 2023It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I’m still to be born.
Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door.
By Leah RutherfordSeptember 2023One history that especially fascinates me is The Sun’s. On the wall of my office is a calendar the magazine sent to subscribers — all forty or so of them — at the beginning of 1977. It’s outdated and nonfunctional, but I hung it there because of its . . . well, grooviness. I like the horoscope-adjacent artwork and the handmade feel. It’s very much a product of its time, the kind of thing my brother would call “crunchy.”
By Derek AskeySeptember 2023There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.
By Craig ReinboldSeptember 2023My fly line unspools across the water like a long sentence / whose final punctuation is a grizzly hackle tied by a friend. / He clamped his fly vise to the branch of a fallen pine / right after we arrived by mule train at this Montana river.
By Erik ReeceSeptember 2023Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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