Holding by Laura Joyce-Hubbard
I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. Every takeoff is the same, but I am always on alert for the one that will be different. In Bosnia or Boston. Panama or Palm Springs. On short…
Tag: Braided Essay
Empty Nest by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
My youngest brother runs away from home again the morning the baby robins fly from the nest. All spring, I watch a mother robin build her nest under my deck. It rests next to the half-dozen hollowed-out husks abandoned…
Of Way Trails and Wolves by Caitlin Scarano
It was a hot August morning in 2017 when I finished packing everything I cared to keep into my blue Forester (including cat, dog, and the few boxes of things I hadn’t sold or given away) and left Milwaukee.…
Lessons in Entomology by Gabriel Holton
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
Terminal Portraiture by Davin Faris
i. Candies gush across the ground. They clot and pool. Where the pale floorboards converge against the wall, they glitter in a long stream of plastic-wrapped sweets, the sort you’d see on a receptionist’s desk. Red, yellow, green, swirled…
Still. Life. by Nicole Walker
Max was two. Zoe, seven. I was forty, when the nurse called and told me I needed to come in for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. My manners couldn’t catch up with my physical reaction. I started yelling why…
The Way Seahorses Hang On by Anne Panning
I. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. …
The Novel, The Map by Hannah Grieco
Content Warning—suicidal ideation in a child Right after my forty-sixth birthday, I begin writing a novel. It’s about a mother who loses all sense of personal identity while taking care of her very ill son. A mother who…
Yield by Jolene McIlwain
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
Following Floodlights Instead of the Moon by Gina DeMillo Wagner
The nature center has five baby sea turtles, each in their own 20-gallon saltwater tank. When I see them for the first time, I have to fight the impulse to plunge my hand into the water and scoop one…
