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Facing a flock of cowards wearing sheets, caring for a parent, making a new friend
By Our ReadersSeptember 2005I was fucking a near stranger in northeast Chicago when my mother died. His name was Jonathan. He was tall, long-limbed with enormous hands and prematurely gray hair, an activist who lectured on “the struggle” so genuinely I almost believed him: that we would win this, whoever “we” were, whatever it was.
By Jessica Max SteinAugust 2005My mother’s call came on a white December morning. I had forgotten to expect it. There was a time when I’d waited for it daily: the news that my father’s emphysema had finished him. He’d been given three to six months, and it was now five years after the prognosis. I was mystified by his survival.
By Lindsay FitzgeraldAugust 2005A Froot Loops message board, bicycle soccer, the MIT blackjack team
By Our ReadersAugust 2005Today is four years since the accident that nearly took my daughter’s life; four years since the phone call that yanked me out of my Sunday routine, my idiotic notion that the day would go the way I wanted it to. It was a car crash. It could have been a bolt of lightning, Zeus showing off.
By Sy SafranskyJuly 2005When I first started in the morning, all of a sudden pieces fell into place that I hadn’t been able to find for hours the day before. Anytime you come to it fresh, you see things that your tired eyes didn’t.
By Michelle OrangeJune 2005Running away from your life, hiding from a would-be rapist, watching the neighborly veneer crack after two hurricanes
By Our ReadersMay 2005Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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