Issue 11 / Fall 2017 Finder’s keepers, loser’s weepers “Mommy, can I keep this?” asks six-year-old Simone. “Please.” She’s holding a scrap of apple-green wrapping paper with irregular-shaped red hearts suspended in air. It was left over from wrapping a...
Issue 10 / Summer 2017 I found my writing journal from 1986. This isn’t a remarkable discovery, except for the timing of finding it. I read to page four and stopped dead in my tracks. I’d written about my friend and neighbor, Elizabeth Skowran, or Liz as I knew...
Issue 10 / Summer 2017 Though I had known him for over forty years, I never really knew him. He was dying now in the hospice wing of the nursing home. A nurse sat at a desk by his side taking notes. She looked up from her clipboard, glanced at the clock, then...
Issue 10 / Summer 2017 For three years in the 1970s my father lived in Malawi in an abandoned fish warehouse that he converted into a home with the help of his friend Vaughan and a group of Malawian day laborers. He moved there to avoid conscription into the...
Issue 9 / Spring 2017 Oh lung that keeps collapsing, you are stretched long and thin by your own weight, categorized as a health risk for any tall, skinny, Caucasian male. “Stretched like a water balloon,” the surgeon said. “The weight of the liquid pulls the...
Issue 9 / Spring 2017 They said all she’d need was five, maybe six outfits. Laundry twice a week. This place, this “extended studio” that was actually only a long L-shaped room. The social worker at the hospital after Mom’s emergency said what counted now was...
