Category: Nonfiction

  • Bitter to Ripe

    By DM Anderson I was twelve years old the first time I uttered the words son of a bitch. Naturally, I had no idea what those words meant. I was merely a child. I only knew the expression came with a sinister adult-sized connotation. That same year was also when I decided to move my…

  • The Zoo

    By Eli Coyle It was a late Saturday afternoon, the last whispers of February drifting away, and the Zoo was alive, a cacophony of youthful chaos. Not a literal zoo, but the name we bestowed upon our apartment complex, an ecosystem thriving with untamed twenty-somethings running wild, fueled by the heady mix of drugs and…

  • Body Doubles

    By Katie R McKay I’ve always hated the spring, but it’s the time of year I’m most prone to falling in love. When I think back to that spring, I think about so many things, things like the balmy weather, the day drinking, the rolling nature of the days, one blurring into another in a…

  • 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…

  • Now You See Me

    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.…

  • Seven-Year Love

    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.

  • 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.

  • Ice Is A Rock That Flows*

    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.