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A bout of malaria, a taboo friendship, a long blonde braid
By Our ReadersMay 2012It’s summer, and I’m lying outside on a quilt on the grass. The quilt is one of our old ones, thin gray fabric on both sides with lumpy batting in between, top and bottom held together by short lengths of coarse red string pulled though the layers at intervals and tied into knots.
By Carolyn MillerMay 2012An inventive imagination was a gift of the gods — or a curse if you couldn’t control it. Elsie would sometimes start talking, telling a story, say, and get so carried away, piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents, that she might as well have been speaking in tongues. If you pointed this out to her, her response would be to clam up.
By Sigrid NunezApril 2012In sixth grade I played football in rural Ash Creek, Arizona. My family had just moved there from a suburb of Phoenix, and my only prior experience with football had been when my dad would toss one around with my two younger brothers and me, drilling me in the chest with hard passes.
By Jerry D. Mathes IIApril 2012For the last seven years, my father and I have kayaked a thirty-six-mile portion of Oregon’s Rogue River each August. We run the river in an inflatable kayak, him reading the water and me providing the manpower to paddle the boat through world-class rapids.
By Michael CoppermanApril 2012Every few days or so, when his loneliness becomes impossible to bear, Rodrigo leaves his Manhattan high school and goes to Central Park. He wanders off the paved roads and makes his way to the secluded, wooded trails, just a few blocks from the housing project in Harlem where he grew up. There he drifts and waits. He might lean against a tree or roam along a trail. Eventually a man will show up.
By Ryan BergMarch 2012There was a flutter in my rib cage, a somersault of uneasiness. I hadn’t witnessed such concentrated weirdness up close since my parents were alive: my father’s conspiracy theories and colon-cleansing elixirs; my mother’s ground-up lithium in a locket around her neck.
By Cynthia WeinerMarch 2012My first day was unbearable, much worse than I could have imagined, a textbook lesson in humility. My strength, stamina, and intelligence — in other words, my superiority — ended up not being worth a bent nail. Stepping onto the job site that first day at 6:45 AM, I had no idea what a hod was, even though the word had been embedded in my family lexicon, seared into my unconscious.
By Joseph BathantiFebruary 2012The lilies leaning from their vase, opening / their legs, their arms, even their splitting pale-pink torsos / over the kitchen table — / its clutter of bills and crumbs.
By Judith JoyceFebruary 2012I am nine years old, watching my mother nurse my new baby brother. She is sitting in the old rocker, humming a thin, sweet thread of a song.
By Alison LutermanJanuary 2012Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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