Tracy Rundstrom Tracing Life Lines and Mending Heart Strings The sounds of the kitchen wake me up. Water running. Dishes being put away. Or maybe a knife being pulled out. I tense up, terrified she is following through with the…
Annee Lyons On the Fallen Caryatid CARYATID (n.) – a female figure serving as a column, bearing weight where a pillar might stand. Rodin’s fallen caryatid is still holding her stone. She’s crumpled beneath it, but she hasn’t let…
Sue Eisenfeld Forbidden On the corner of Zion and Hanley Roads in a village called Market Shop in Saint George Gingerland Parish on the Caribbean island of Nevis lies the Gingerland Public Cemetery. It’s a small spread of above-ground horizontal…
Amy Wise Rothschild To Teach, To Touch The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/wasn’t that I had longed for a younger sibling—someone to care for, or else, someone even smaller than me, to absorb the family pain.…
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer Anosognosia On the contrary you knew you were not psychiatrically ill and that that in fact was the threat they held over you—a false diagnosis and an engineered pattern of behavior constructed at great expense of money and…
Efrén Ordóñez Garza Tomorrow on the Page Think on Me The most haunting scene in any book I’ve read opens with the narrator telling the reader that no one ever expects to find themselves holding a dead body at any…
Jessica Cuello Childhood Icons Write about a person you admire: Hercules is a person I admire. He lived a long time ago, in a time of myth and legend. Hera, his evil stepmother, sent a monster to destroy him. It…
Jonathan Starke Never Was I always remember you like this. Sitting on my washing machine with a T-shirt pulled over your knees, staring out the window the morning after our first night together. One of the most beautiful images I’ll…
Paul Bachleitner CODE 21 The microwave rings, and I dash across the seventh-floor lounge in a few jaunty strides. When I pull off the lid of my Tupperware, steam from leftovers of the meal my mom made last Sunday carries…
Bruce Petronio Safe House “God Doesn’t Rhyme Siblings” The youngest sibling of three is sixty-year-old Jane. Though christened Jane and not Giovanna, she is heart & soul Italiana. She has never resided outside Syracuse’s Little Italy; she grew up speaking…