GraceM

Jenna Klobucher

I come from a simple family—we sing in deafening harmony on road trips, we take too many photos at unremarkable events (lunch at McDonald’s, second and third days of kindergarten). So for a long time, nobody could make sense of my sister’s outbursts. She cried at school, she cried at the beach, she cried even when we got a new puppy. Her raw, red eyes emptied uncharted distress and she recoiled bitterly at any semblance of joy. These tormented sobs racked her scrawny bones for a while as my parents […]

Ash Taylor

I remember when the great oak tree on my elementary school campus was felled. The district said the tree was diseased, that it was rotting at the root, and they brought in monstrous yellow machinery to remedy the situation. First, they cut away all of the naked branches, then they ripped the trunk straight out of the ground, leaving nothing but a patch of dust behind. I was eight, and the loss of that tree was the biggest tragedy I could imagine.

I remember, a week before, I sat […]

Anu Pohani

The 1980s

Our flight lands at JFK at 3 p.m. It takes us a few hours to get all our luggage, load up and truck across the two bridges home. “I hope there’s no traffic on the Tri-boro,” Dad says to no one in particular. We eat the snacks in Mom’s handbag, reserved for emergencies. Still hungry, we start to bicker. There is always traffic on the Tri-Boro Bridge on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Typically, the George Washington Bridge entrance is where things clear up.

When we […]

Don Noel

One of my favorite photos is of our year-old daughter, looking over her shoulder from a foot-high galvanized tub on a bare cement floor, waiting to be bathed. It is the summer of 1959; we are pinched into the concrete-block toolshed I’d built a year earlier for practice. It has become our home while I labor to get our new house roofed, enclosed, and heated before autumn cold makes the toolshed intolerable. I work longer hours every evening than I do at my job.

I smile […]

Elizabeth Jaeger

I am trying desperately to pretend that today is not Ash Wednesday, but I have not been very successful. There was a time I looked forward to Lent. True, it’s been years since I went to service to get ashes—at best, I’m a lapsed Christian. When my son was younger, I made an effort to bring him to church. For several years, I was good about it. But then after one summer, it was too hard to go back. Being active in church required me to be social, […]

Allie Coppola

I have pink eye. At least, I think I do. And if I don’t already, I will soon. I can feel the little leggy bacteria marching along the rim of my lower eyelid, thrusting their germy arms, pumping their microbial fists as they exert a final bacterial battle cry before completing the conjunctivitis coup of my conjunctiva. They are here. These bacterial bastards, ready to ravage my eyeball and tickle my tear ducts, are mating and multiplying and personifying before (and within) my very eyes. I can picture them clearly: […]

Nicole Drakopoulos

The telling of this story comes in different versions. There are my recreations: fallible, beautiful, and naive. There is a truth: unattainable, likely nonexistent. There’s his version, muted. There’s a version written in the heat and pain of our separation. Words flowing from a place of desperation, scribbled onto a page to hold onto him, onto us, to prevent our reality from dissolving into a fading memory. Much of that writing is raw, desperate, repetitive. These words were therapy, a way of making sense of a person I […]

Sarah Ang

Cathy Caruth’s seminal work Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History suggests that at the centre of trauma narratives lies “a kind of double telling…between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (Caruth, 1996, 7). This ‘double telling’ is at the heart of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which revolves around the tragic mistake of the thirteen-year-old protagonist, Briony Tallis, accusing her sister’s lover wrongfully of rape, the drastic repercussions that […]