Mom’s Night Out
It’s been a long week, and we’re all excited to be out. Excited to be eating our dinner without a small human on our laps. Excited to not be needed for a few hours. Excited to be among friends. One of us has put in fifty hours at the office …
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Essay One for English 101 by Angela Abaya Ono
Have you ever seen a walrus fall from the sky? Forced to find space on a crowded melting glacier, the walrus scales steep ice cliffs. Unfortunately, they have poor depth perception. Seeing the ocean, they leap from the bluff, blubbery bodies cartwheeling through the air before plummeting into the sea …
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I Retrospect Nature
This piece was shared with us by Amy Losak, daughter of the author, Sydell Rosenberg (1929-1996). While Rosenberg’s short stories are works of fiction, they are loosely based on her life as the daughter of immigrant Eastern European Jews in New York City. I was a child of the …
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Zephyr
SJ boards the California Zephyr at 7:03 PM in Denver. It’s her first time aboard the train, and it overwhelms her. She’s never experienced anything like climbing onto the second floor of a giant, movable building and being welcomed by an impossibly long hallway of large, royal-blue seats. She stows …
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Sea Change
After slumping into their late twenties, the girls only ever got together for wedding and baby-related events. Their fiancés and husbands and soon-to-be-children gave them perfect cause to reunite and celebrate. It was good to catch up, but more than that, they reveled in slipping back into younger and freer …
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The Sound of Emily
Drained long ago, the gray pit fills with layer upon layer of soggy leaves, twigs, plastic bags, pop cans. Leading into that abyss is a fiberglass slide, emerging now like a ghost in the low morning light, taunting him with its unfaded aquamarine, its phony tropicality. From the window, it’s …
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But You Didn’t
Was it terrible? That time in the tiny market across from St. Bartholomew’s, where kids would stop before school for Tastykake pies and licorice, the morning when you and Nick Cane, rushing into the store just minutes before the bell rang, found the owner stretched out on the floor behind …
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Summer of ’76
I love Ali MacGraw. I love her hair in the movie Love Story. Ma doesn’t. She accosts us―my friends and me―as we emerge from the theater that screens English movies. I’m in a celluloid trance as she grips my arm with her work-worn fingers and drags me home, where she …
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Home Schooling
cw: domestic abuse/neglect Desert Road, New Zealand. November 1985. Caoimhe Connelly was blithely unconcerned that her parents were waking two hundred odd miles north, asking where the hell has she gone this time? Jandals kicked off, feet on the dash, she read the DepEd leaflet (Home Schooling Curriculum) while …
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Set the City Spinning
The winter after I had my heart broken, I fell in love with the city. The sound of bike bells and dog barks and arguments and lust and longing and feet and tables and chairs scraping, spilling through walls and windows and ceilings every hour of every day, blanketing me …
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