“I am the world’s greatest magician bank robber. Watch as I fly through these bars on my magic smoke cape. Mumbo Jumbo!” Owen muttered to himself as he hung upside down on the monkey bars in the school’s playground before homeroom. It was a cold November morning, and every word Owen said transformed itself into a tiny cotton candy cloud. …
Peter Munro is a former fisheries scientist who worked in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Seattle. Munro has recently earned a poetry MFA at the University of Washington. Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, The Birmingham…
5 Weeks Cassie sunk into the shadows of the pharmacy’s exterior wall. Just thirty minutes after sundown and Brookings was already shrouded in an obscuring darkness. She’d thought that by her second year living there, she would have adjusted to this less than likeable detail of life in South Dakota, but no. Spotlighted under the fluorescent glow of the streetlight,…
Sopan Deb is a playwright, author and writer for The New York Times, where his topics have included sports and culture. He is the author of the novel Keya Das’s Second Act, and the memoir, Missed Translations: Meeting The Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me. Before joining the Times, Deb covered Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign as a campaign embed for…
When you work for the cat sanctuary, you have everything you need. You may not be able to afford the organic yogurt with its own sidecar of muesli topping. You should lay down any lust for handbags with proud monograms. But you will have a seat on the speed dial of a man whose email address begins with “108shamans.” When…
From my reception desk in the lobby, I watched my boss hang a poster, featuring a team of superheroes familiar from comic books and franchise films. “Heroes Work Here,” the poster declared. The heroes here looked nothing like the ones on the poster. Instead of athletic bodies able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, most employees were women…
Our first date was going pretty well, I thought. Learning to make guacamole in a cooking class. “Oh no, I’m getting teary onion eyes,” Brooke giggled. She wiped at her cheeks with her forearms, but they were all skin and elbows, with nothing fleshy to apply. I was supposed to be learning how to fondle a ripe avocado, but I…
Ode to the Phlebotomist at 2135 Holbrook Road praise that when I rise by myself in an empty elevator in secret I always turn my back to the doors praise a tiny defiance that can be as silly and stupid as this empty waiting room waking itself up at 7:45AM and wiping the dust out of its eyes as I…
It wasn’t that I was bad at teaching. All the qualities that had made me a terrible student in high school made me a great teacher now. I moved fast, I made a lot of jokes, and it was okay if I went off topic. (The only useful thing I learned in my teacher credential program was how to get…
Ubutata Kutatishyanya The duties of a father and child must be reciprocal Bemba proverb. I am learning about forgiveness through a recollection of vertigo after my father. A Sunday before school, I am eleven, and the most important worry is how I will render myself to my friends in light of another loss for which they’ll punish me with…