Issue 20 / Winter 2020 This is what I know. August: He tells the nurse who lives next door that the strange gash above and behind his right ear is from falling in the night. Disoriented and tangled in the sheets, he hit his head on a piece of furniture. But he...
Issue 20 / Winter 2020 She painted with tempera on the kitchen floor, an old roll-up window shade soaking up the excess. Painted with confidence and abandon. Here a dragon, there a mermaid, recognizable to her alone. Graduated to an easel and drippy paints that...
Issue 20 / Winter 2020 The elevator comes and goes, comes and goes. I stand in a stupor, oblivious to the whooshing of doors opening and closing. Mundane functions like getting into an elevator seem irrevocably unimportant while my thoughts jump radically...
Issue 19 / Fall 2019 “Mom, check your email for a message from 20 West Spa. It’s not spam,” read the late-night text. Yep, there in my junk folder was the message I would never have opened. I was the recipient of a very generous gift certificate. A quick...
Issue 19 / Fall 2019 My mother’s first memory was a dark one. She was three, living in the gray, perilous misery of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania. The ghetto had become her home as a baby. She, who had just celebrated her first birthday with her cousins, aunts,...
Issue 19 / Fall 2019 This piece is a continuation of Jon Epstein’s “Ace in the Hole,” published in the Quarterly’s Issue 16, Winter 2019, and “Ace in the Hole: Part II,” published in Quarterly’s Issue 17, Spring 2019. It’s a...
