Category: Nonfiction
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The Elsewhere or: On Reading A Brief History of Time
By Jacob Simmons In less than half a century, man’s view of the universe has been transformed. In less than a year, I’ll be forty. Jesus. Forty years old. When I was in my twenties, I moved to the middle of a blackberry field, into a farmhouse that roasts me like a chicken when Fresno…
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Now You See Me
A girl goes missing sometime in August. She is on a road trip with her fiancé, driving across the country in a van, documenting her journey on Instagram—#vanlife. She uploads her last post in August. She smiles, holding a crocheted pumpkin. Her milky white teeth betray innocence; her fine blonde hair frames a delicate face.…
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Seven-Year Love
Is it crazy to fall in love with a girl because of the way she said no? Fall of 2010, our last year at Calvin College, I was keeping N company while she worked the student apartment desk, and I started talking about depression.
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On Levitation
I am all of five, laid out on my grandparent’s back stoop in the midday midwestern midsummer sun.
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The Day
September 25, 2008. “He’s not breathing,” our son’s girlfriend says, as she slips into our bedroom at three in the morning.
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Ice Is A Rock That Flows*
You and Tom have been together for three months when, meeting him for dinner, you’re taken aback to see that he has the remnants of a shiner, a fading plum-colored crescent on his cheekbone and a scarlet patch in the white of his eye.
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93 Nola
The curtain is thin in New Orleans. The beyond closer, the dead nearer. You hear it in the wailing music, you see it in the grey mists off the river, you feel it in cold air radiating off sunbaked bricks.
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Purgatory
A haunted Keno screen still flashes inside the bar. Some allege that the landlord’s wife goes in there to play and drink wine, as was her habit when the bar was open.