#118: Nonfiction by Justin McDevitt
Minimum Fifteen Like any stubborn person, I only checked the weather when I was already outside. Tonight was no exception, only it was a blizzard. The reward for survival was a modest one: a seven hour bar shift. Growing up in New England taught me that there were almost never snow days. While standard nine-to-five […]
#114: Nonfiction by Ruth Neuwald Falcon
EVERYTHING WANTS TO LIVE (Photo credit: Sue Robin) It took my father a very long time to die. He started shortly before my eighteenth birthday and didn’t finish until I was nearly thirty-five. He did it slowly, incrementally, almost invisibly at times, punctuated by occasional rushes downhill. My life moved along its parallel track, through […]
#111: Nonfiction by Yvonne Wakefield
CUNTSVILLE.ORG That churlish smirk made me look down, not in submission, but in search of a shattering vessel to address her kisser. The perfect hourglass-vase was back home in Oregon, but in Switzerland, I had only my wits, a delicate defense mechanism wrecked, along with allusions of literary camaraderie. To the tune of over $5,000, […]
#108: Nonfiction by Joanne Furio
YOU ARE MY CANDY GIRL “I want a quarter pound of nonpareils!” She was my grandmother’s age. Wore the same cat’s eyeglasses and navy polka-dot dress. “Milk or dark?” “Dark.” I had never heard of nonpareils before I started working at John Wanamaker’s candy counter. They are quarter-sized circular chocolates sprinkled with tiny, white dots, popularly known […]
#107: Nonfiction by David James
ELEVATOR OPERATORS AND PILOTS We were cruising west under a moonless dome of stars against the usual nighttime flow of heavy traffic bound for Europe. Our route kept us just north of the Atlantic track system, a set of parallel airways now stacked with oncoming planes. Three hours had elapsed since departing Stockholm, and another three would pass […]
#106: Nonfiction by Lindsey Wente
SLUTS DON’T HAVE BABIES It’s Christmas on the Wente side, which means it is January, Grandma Kathy is making chicken and rice, and everyone I’ve known is invited. My mother, her new husband (my stepdad), her old husband (my biological dad). Cheating exes (my biological dad, two of my uncles). New girlfriends. Ghosts. Estranged sons. This […]
#104: Nonfiction by Michael Zimecki
RADIUM MAN Ebenezer MacBurney Byers delighted in telling everyone, especially his female friends, that he was radioactive. “I’ll make you glow,” he said to every woman he met. And it was true. He left all of his lovers satisfied. There had been no complaints on that score since he started drinking Radithor. Radithor was a […]
Cobalt Baseball Issue: The Ninth
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#103: Nonfiction by Madison Block
ALL MY LOVE ALWAYS “These look like engagement photos,” Mads laughed as we looked at the pictures we had taken at Keukenhof, the famous tulip garden in the Netherlands. It was our second year living in Leiden, and by now we knew that spring was when the Dutch landscape was at its most beautiful. “Oh […]
#102: Nonfiction by William Tang
THE DREAMED WALL “But for a dream, the Great Wall was built; but for the wall, the empire fell.” He Zi-Qing何自清, Chinese historian In 214 BC, a tall, red-faced apparition appeared in front of the Emperor. The creature waved a flaming sword and declared, “Hu will be the one that destroys the Ch’in,” then […]