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A four-page letter, a broken microwave, a game of solitare
By Our ReadersJuly 2009We lived in an old, two-story Arts and Crafts house with an elevator, which was permanently stuck on the second floor. We used it as a storage closet, and it was my favorite place in the whole house. Now I went into the elevator and shut the gate and sat in one of the antique ladder-back chairs that my father had put in there, and I looked over the Chopin piece in my piano book and tried to visualize my future.
By Christian ZwahlenJuly 2009There are three things you need to be a smelt fisherman: a net, a bucket, and your thumb. There is only one thing you need to be a cadaver, and that’s to be dead. My father and I had gone smelt fishing each spring ever since I’d turned seven. Now it was 1972, I was a boy of ten, and Richard Nixon had just been reelected president.
By Beth MayerJuly 2009The morning light makes promises it has no intention of keeping, but why quibble? Look how it shines on my aging face and my fading to-do list. Look how it caresses my wife of twenty-five years. As if darkness has been banished. As if everything is lit from within.
By Sy SafranskyJune 2009“Please, call me Dr. Jim.” My father, whose boots were caked with hog manure, appeared relieved, and they sat down to review what would happen on the day of my sister’s surgery. Dina had to have her back operated on, or her S-shaped spinal column would eventually crush her heart.
By Doug CrandellJune 2009Yesterday is gone. “Wednesday,” we called it. So far Thursday is looking a lot like Wednesday except for one obvious difference: Wednesday is no more. Wednesday has ceased to be. Yes, Wednesday is like the dead parrot in that Monty Python skit: Stiff. Bereft of life.
By Sy SafranskyMay 2009Our first night in Nashville, a man died right in front of us on Broadway. My father was at the wheel, my brother was in the seat beside him, and I was in back with the window rolled down, taking in the musty, fertile smell of the South.
By Amanda ReaMay 2009An apartment swap; a furniture auction; Block 6, Barracks 4, Unit C
By Our ReadersMay 2009My mind had a mind of its own, and over the top of the real world, my mind’s mind projected a world that to me was even more real. Creston Avenue — the street I lived on with my mother and my older sister, Asia — was two streets: one the way it actually was, and one the way it ought to be.
By Akhim Yuseff CabeyMay 2009Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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