You’re on the decline, she said. I had come for a frozen shoulder. I didn’t even know that could happen. Apparently they just stop working, turn solid, you have to take your other arm, lift them up, plop them down and then they lay there useless. Right now one of my arm pits has deodorant on it, the other does not.
Tag: creative non-fiction
ESSAY | Eating Khichdi in Kenya – Farah Ahamed
Nairobi, Kenya, Sunday, 1st August, 1982
I was twelve years old when I first ate khichdi for ten days in a row. It was also the first time I heard the words ‘coup d’etat.’ That Sunday, my mother came into my bedroom at three in the morning and whispered I should move to her room. In her bed, behind a locked door, we heard gun shots. The telephone lines were dead. There was no power. My mother did not know what was happening and we had no way of contacting anyone.
ESSAY | Don’t Rattle Granny’s Bones – Sharon Kirsch
I am the daughter of a man with a TripTik. You may not know what a TripTik is, or you may understand it to be a triptych, a work of art made up of three panels, often hinged together in a sacred altarpiece.
ESSAY | Corn and Chicken and Death and The Return – Alan Weltzien
The fact that we’d never visited Mexico apart from a couple of long-ago weeks in Tulum, Yucatan might explain my scanty knowledge of El Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. I knew it wasn’t connected to Ireland’s Samhain or All Hallow’s Eve, beloved in my childhood.
ESSAY | Why Bother with the Books? – Mia Cresswell-Melstrøm
Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.
ESSAY | A Citizen Of The World – Isaac Aju
There was something very claustrophobic about being in Nigeria. Nigeria gagged its people. Nigeria strangled people’s voices. People were often afraid to speak out. People were always afraid for no reason, and so being in Nigeria was the last thing you wanted to do. You wanted to move out of Nigeria. If that would not be possible, then you wanted to connect with people who were not Nigerians. You wanted to know more about the world. You wanted to move into the real world. You wanted your mindset to morph from Nigeria to The World.
ESSAY | Trying To See – Erin Ruble
On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.
ESSAY | Initiation – Kate Stukenborg
I wanted to be a part of their club, their conversations, their laughter. Eating, I decided, was my way in.
Garden of Weeds – K.P. Taylor
My mother loved her garden: the Lily of the Nile, the roses, the lemon tree, the hydrangea at her bedroom window. Hydrangeas flower blue or pink depending on your soil – hers were always blue. The weeds, however, she did not love. “A weed is just a flower growing in the wrong place,” she would…
The Author’s Version of Events – Charley Barnes
A True Crime Story Which Never Happened I [hereafter known as The Author] have been considering truth and fact. Truth, as something malleable. Fact, as something that influences the changing of truths.[1] The Author has considered this in particular detail in relation to True Crime and the ways in which truth is manipulated here (no,…
COMFORT FOODS // Sour moon – Ieva Grigelionyte
The first important thing in making fermented cabbage is to choose a good cabbage head.
Lemons – Victory Witherkeigh
“You made it, Grandma!” I said as I gave her a hug. The gold tassel swished in my face from the graduation cap I hadn’t removed yet. “I’ve been to all your graduations, Iha,” she replied in a huff, “And, I’ll be at the next one.” I gripped her hand as she steadied herself with…
Porridge 