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Denise figured the mom was dead; she had to be. The dad did the shopping now, and unless the mom was traveling for work for, like, a month or something, it was the only explanation.
Point of fact: Just last month the daughter and the mom had been talking while checking out at Denise’s register, and the daughter had asked for Lunchables, and the mom had said, “You will eat those over my dead body.”
Now the dad was buying five of them a week.
By Tara McCarthy AltebrandoApril 2025This 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.
By M.D. McIntyreMarch 2025I’ve taken to telling young people that it takes ten years to get from age twenty to age twenty-five, five years to get from twenty-five to thirty, and three years, tops, to get from thirty to forty. So far, forty to fifty doesn’t seem like it’ll amount to much more than a long weekend. The people my age and older laugh knowingly, and the youngsters nod like Sure, sure, whatever you say, Gramps, and I am left, every time, wondering why the only thing we know to do with the stuff that terrifies us is to make jokes about it that aren’t really jokes at all.
A foreign sports car, a Hawaiian vacation, a glass of water on a hot day
By Our ReadersDecember 2024They say you eventually get desperate / enough to call a stranger, someone / who’s added her number to a database / for the incarcerated, someone who’s / even more alone than you.
By Erik TschekunowNovember 2024I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.
By Becky MandelbaumNovember 2024Instead of bending spoons with our thoughts, we broke / popsicle sticks with our fists. We didn’t have beards yet, / so we slathered our faces in mayo and shaved / with butter knives. This was called tasting the world / with our skin, and this was called happiness times ten.
By Lance LarsenOctober 2024The omen comes in the ruin of a robin’s egg on the sidewalk: fractured blue splattered with the pink makings of a flightless thing. A plum membrane of skin stretched over eyes like bruises. I make the mistake of looking back at this small disaster, and then the calamity of it fingers the threads of my morning.
By Valentina Ríos RomeroSeptember 2024Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her.
By Erin WoodAugust 2024We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.
By Doug CrandellJuly 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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