Tag: nonfiction
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My Mother’s House, Without My Mother
by Mark Brazaitis My mother is making eggs and chicken sausage in the kitchen. She died a month ago. It’s eight in the morning, and I am waking up in a second-floor bedroom of her house in Washington, D.C. Even after I remember she’s dead, I smell the eggs and sausage. I wonder if I’m…
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I Saw My Friend Last Night
by Clint Martin I saw my friend last night. And boy has it been a while. The moment I spotted my man my mind went to calculating calendars and figured we’d circled the sun almost five times since I’d last stood in the shade of my friend’s shadow. That’s just too long. Especially for a…
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From A Distance
by Marlene Olin They were stranded in space. Somehow an eight-day test run had turned into a nine-month ordeal. Butch and Suni weathered the circumstances as best they could. But sometimes events spiral. Sometimes the joystick falls out of your grasp. Home or the heavens. Did they have a choice? This year I turned seventy-two.…
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The List of Gruesome Places
by Mark Brazaitis As a journalist, my father had covered fires and floods. He’d covered bloody protests and a war in the Middle East. When, in February of 1991, he visited me in Guatemala, where I was working as a Peace Corps volunteer, he asked if we could visit the capital’s infamous basurero. He didn’t…
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What Comes Up
by Angela Townsend Everyone is excited about the norovirus. Some people think it starts with negative thinking, or else it wouldn’t be called the “neuro virus.” Some people attribute their immunity to apple cider vinegar, misanthropy, or the Holy Ghost. Some people assume you have the stomach for an unabridged reading of their personal norovirus…
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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…
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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…
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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…