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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 2025When you get to your father's bedroom, you see Dad shaking like a freshly fumigated bug. Your brother is by his side on the phone, his face red and sweaty, like when he's been skateboarding all day.
By Christina BerkeApril 2025On a solo backpacking trip, in a desert military base, at a church revival
Dad was happiest in early spring, / when the lake thawed and the fish stirred. / When bluegills rose to snowflakes. / When the whole world got hungry.
By Andrea L. FryMarch 2025I like to be reminded—need to be reminded—that my father was young once, that he had a crush on a girl in his one-room schoolhouse near Ladies Chapel, that he looked forward to helping his aunt Alverdia tend bees or pick watermelon from the large patch near the creek, his feet smeared red with clay.
By Todd DavisFebruary 2025I was a sleepwalker through most of those days. A passenger in / my own life. I couldn’t look / to my family and see myself reflected there. I was / born to no one. I was wild.
By Didi JacksonFebruary 2025The South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest.
By Nick MartinJanuary 2025Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.”
By Bruce McKayJanuary 2025I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.
By Matt CashionJanuary 2025As he aged, my father dwindled, / not in stature—though he grew smaller, / as elders must—but rather in estate. / He never required much, // insisted on giving things away. / What am I going to do with all this?
By Joseph BathantiDecember 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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