Why I Envy Pocket Watches
Daniel Olivieri
Click the button and the clamshell of the pocket watch opens to reveal the time like an oyster revealing its pearl. Time may be less valuable than a pearl, but ...
Nonfiction
If
Karen Bellavance-Grace
Cathy was working at a house for women trying to kick addictions when I met her. Her sense of humor was brash and brittle-dry. She was a native New Jerseyan in ...
Underwater
Kelly Grogan
Emergency personnel were called to the harbor Thursday afternoon after a man drowned while attempting to rescue a child.
He was forty, or thirty-five, or eight...
Tatau
Briana Loveall
When I was eighteen, and she was sixteen, I took my sister with me to get what would be my first tattoo—her name.I hadn’t known to research tattoo artists; ...
The Boots
Kelly Griffiths
A 1977 divorce was trailblazing, and a custodial father was positively extraterrestrial. I was six.A serpentine driveway tethered our farmhouse to the count...
Let The Trees Remember
Lorraine Wilson
In the Russian Taiga, the forests west of Moscow, there are places where compasses do not work. Where there is so much lead in the trees, so many bullets hidden...
Before There Was a Road
Melanie McCabe
Maybe it began in the cool, green darkness beneath my mother’s rhododendron. Somehow I must have sensed, even at eight years old, that what I was doing was wron...
We Knocked Hard
Jacob M. Hall
I tried to count the blisters on my feet while you watched from the doorway. At age five, you were a year younger than me, just outside a dirty bathroom in a ho...
A Quiet Man
Wayne Scheer
You should have had a raucous Irish wake, the kind you see in movies. A bottle should have been passed from mourner to mourner, each telling stories about you, ...
The Gravity of Air
Claire Polders
We trudge through the cold as if burdened by stones. But not as if burdened. We are burdened for real, just not by stones. It’s the day’s gravity that weighs us...