Category: Creative Nonfiction
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Haircut
by Kathy Fagan ~ The last time I touched my father I cut his coarse gray hair and trimmed his fingernails, grown ragged in lockdown. We were not permitted indoor visits, but I could take him out of the facility for a medical appointment provided I was screened for covid and we wore masks. That…
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Mother Tongue
by Ofelia Brooks ~ For weeks after my grandmother’s death, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t miss her, because I didn’t really know her. I didn’t know anything about her interests or passions, or much about her life before she was my grandmother. But I knew what she sounded like. And that’s what I missed.
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Upon Receiving The California Department of Fish and Wildlife Angler Update
by Lynn Mundell ~ Memory is like fishing. Out of the murk it swims, we pull it up, keeping even what’s too small to sustain us. In May the new motor fell into the Pacific and we floated, you and I, waiting to be towed. I carry an image of our catch hooked to the…
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Graffiti the Walls
by Matt Barrett ~ I want to graffiti the walls where my grandmother lives, white and sterile walls (egg-shell colored walls, as the nurses say), replace her sanitation lists with photographs, magazine spreads, and paper clippings…
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Swimming with My Grandma
by Brooke Randel ~ On my birthday, my grandma loses her speech. Her caregiver thinks it might be a stroke. She is rushed to the ER and I visit her there hours later when her speech has returned and she uses it to introduce me to the nurse. She’s Romanian, she tells me, delighted. This…
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Nearly New Rockports
by Anita Brienza ~ As my father got older and unable to bend and tie his shoes himself, I’d kneel to do it for him, talking rapidly with each shoelace loop so that he didn’t feel awkward having his adult daughter tending to him like a child.
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A Good Death
by Darci Schummer ~ “I’m protesting Dad’s death,” my mom says. The day before he dies, she emerges from their bedroom wearing one of his shirts. We are all wearing them now: me, my sisters, my brother. I started it but don’t know why. I just know it feels good inside the hollow lengths of…
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Skim Coats
by Amy Barnes ~ Hello the grandparents say in cartoon smoke balloons. My not-so-grand parents stand reduced to a suitcase and rummage sale remnant coats. There is money for two things: coffee and cigarettes.
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A Stream of Prayer
by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar ~ Last week, I video-called Khala, teased her for lounging in the hospital, enjoying being pampered by nurses. If there’s one thing that years of staticky telephone calls and shaky Internet connections has taught me, it is to wrap emotions with levity.
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Orange Communion
by Marcy Dilworth ~ I pushed the hypodermic needle through the skin while jamming down the plunger. Wrong. Half the saline spurted back at me. Nurse Ellen coached me through the steps, which are meant to be sequential – puncture skin, push needle until barrel rests on skin, depress plunger, pull needle out.
ONE WILD RIDE 