Bleached bones, picked clean by a lion, are left to bake under the East African sun, says the reedy-voiced British narrator on the nature film I watch from beneath a mound of covers. The abandoned bones stop the elephant matriarch in her tracks. She raises her trunk to trumpet a call of distress across the plain, lamenting the death of one once part of her herd. Elephants can remember more than 200 individual, extended family members and recognize them by smell or call, as well as sight. An elephant never forgets. From my sickbed, I watch the matriarch fondle the…
It is Easter morning, one year after Brianna’s life-saving neurosurgery. We are standing in a pew at the congregational church in our hometown, to which we had walked that morning. Long banners hang from the vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary proclaiming Alleluia, and pots of tall lilies surround the communion table. The choir and congregation are mid-song, a big, glorious Easter hymn. Wild sopranos careen behind me: “Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!” All this shouting about triumph over death is making me nervous. I read the hymn, but I don’t sing the words. We woke this morning…
I hold in my hand a passbook for a savings account my father opened with a $30 deposit on October 26, 1960. You may have to be at least as old as I am now—60—to recognize a bank passbook and remember its purpose. This one looks like an American passport, which my dad had yet to acquire, with a somber blue cloth cover embossed with the name of the bank and its branch—Pittsburgh National Bank, Bloomfield Office—in gold. Palm-sized, ideal for slipping into a man’s top pocket. You pulled out your passbook as you entered the bank, where a teller…
1996 My mom picked me up from school early for a doctor’s appointment. Soon we were on the interstate, headed to Atlanta to see the pulmonologist who treated my cystic fibrosis (CF), a genetic disease known for the havoc it wreaks on the lungs. As a kid, I wasn’t trepidatious about these visits. Already a people pleaser at 10 years old, I relished the praise I got when my lungs sounded clear. I would go home satisfied, and life would revert to normal until it was time to return three months later. That was the routine—until today. After the visit,…
“Of course your back hurts,” my wife said. “That’s what you get for doing CrossFit.” For the first time in fifteen years, I was back at the gym on the regular—swinging kettlebells, doing burpees, jerking and contorting. I had just turned forty, and all this exercise seemed like a mild midlife crisis. When the doctor escorted me to the front of the ER waiting room, bypassing crying kids, broken bones and a couple flesh wounds, I realized it was a whole other kind of crisis. Why was I getting the VIP treatment? A grapefruit-sized tumor in my back. How the…
“Five more minutes, then we get out and change our clothes,” I repeat twice. Shomik alternates between dog paddling and flipping himself in the water. I revel at his ease and imagine the sensation of respite, of weightlessness in a heavy world. Shumita, his sister, a first grader, plunges to collect plastic frogs and goldfish at the bottom of the pool. “Mermaid treasures,” she yells jubilantly, “look Shomik, I got a red frog.” Soaking in the warm, silky blue illuminated water feels luxurious. Outside, there is dirty slippery slush and a frigid wind that ices my hair. Twice a week…
by Allison Scagliotti I remember when Tower Records shuttered for good. Gen Xers wept openly, bemoaning the death of their community locus. Too young to have integrated into a scene of my own, I wondered what my version of this loss might be one day. My view from the minivan passenger seat was as much about deciphering the L.A. in which I’d eventually be turned loose as it was navigating from valley apartment to casting call, Thomas Guide open on my lap. Now, after twenty years as a certified Angeleno, the city of my youth fades from existence the way…
By Jackie DesForges Somehow my conversation with Melissa Febos has drifted from cuddle parties to crime fiction. Febos is one of my feminist icons, and crime fiction hasn’t had the most progressive track record as far as fiction genres are concerned, so I’m surprised we’ve ended up here—and besides, we are supposed to be talking about Girlhood, her new collection of essays. But when the topic naturally begins to shift, I tell her—nervously—that I’m writing a crime novel. She tells me—excitedly—that crime is one of her favorite genres to read, but there is a caveat: “I need the writing to…
When California locked down last March to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the physical world seemed to shrink overnight. To contain the virus, we were instructed not to travel unless we were frontline workers. Many of us were confined to our homes.
by Collin Mitchell In her memoir Grand, writer and comedian Sara Schaefer reflects on her childhood and career by way of a river trip through the Grand Canyon that she took in celebration of her fortieth birthday. “The Canyon will take you apart and put you back together again,” she writes, reflecting on the promise a “bucket-listy” adventure like white water rafting makes to its often anxious enlistees. Schaefer readily admits she is one of them. “Maybe down there I could find answers. I wasn’t even sure of the questions, but in that moment I wanted to believe.” In Grand,…