Ready for School by Hana Choi

The day I discovered pleasure was the day I lost my mother. It happened in the fall of 1995 when I was eleven years old. That afternoon I was standing naked on the balcony of our apartment, my skin…
The day I discovered pleasure was the day I lost my mother. It happened in the fall of 1995 when I was eleven years old. That afternoon I was standing naked on the balcony of our apartment, my skin…
January 2021 Today is a day when I hate my house, I hate it for all the things it will never be. For ceilings that are too high for lights in one room and too low for lights in…
In the gathering dusk of an afternoon that still lingers, I followed my father into the woods. He had not prospered in his first attempt to start a nursery business, the crimson-budded azalea liners withering only days after he…
January Two old men used to live next to each other. One is dead and the other is dying. The one that is dead planted a garden. The one that is dying is my father. My father sits in…
Riding the night streets wrapped in our tight young skin, brave-stupid and untamed, magic bursting from our pores like new stars. We met under the sign of the flying horse, the vacant shell of an old gas station, our…
Couch You could call the color of the upholstery rust, but it was rust chasing a pattern. Blanket Harshly fibered, it was never quite white. Arrangement She couldn’t arrange herself after what they’d done to her. Then It started…
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
Essay by Jahzerah Brooks • The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival is, at its core, a story about tearing down and building up. In this debut novel set against the backdrop of a working carnival and a wartime munitions factory,…
The way Appa held the sponge-tipped brush of white shoe polish. The way he ran the snowy viscosity over my scuffed canvas shoes, on top of the laces, around the eyelets. The way he placed my shoes under the…
You are walking home from school. The year is 1983 and you’re 9 or 11 or 13, some awkward age when even the air hurts your thin skin. Maybe it’s the hole in the ozone the news is just…
This essay started with a tweet. One night I was thinking about how many movies and TV shows of the ’70s and ’80s had someone sinking in quicksand. The response to my tweet showed me that lots of other people noticed it as well, which led to a tweet about all the other things we were scared of growing up in the ’80s. In the thread, the same things kept coming up again and again, as if all of us, even though we lived in different parts of the country, were one collective consciousness.
I also loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child. While I was thinking about all the things we were afraid of, it occurred to me how often we were told to be afraid: by our parents, by the news, by the books we read. It’s probably not 100% accurate, but I seem to recall danger lurking within every choice made in the Choose Your Own Adventure books—at least the ones I read—so I wrote one where all the choices lead to some thing we were once afraid of.
As for structure—I rarely write in second person. But not only were the Choose Your Own Adventure books written in the second person, the participatory nature of my tweets asked for it. Of course the essay is about me, but it is also about you—all of you who shared the same fears I did. And while I don’t remember the title of any specific Choose Your Own Adventure book, the fear I felt as a child of the ’80s told me how to end the essay.
PAUL CRENSHAW is the author of the essay collections This One Will Hurt You, published by The Ohio State University Press, and This We’ll Defend, from the University of North Carolina Press. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, and Tin House. Follow him on Twitter @PaulCrenstorm.