Nonfiction

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: […]