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: family
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.
Flash Fiction | Ouroboros — Leyda Mar
Our traveling was so fluid it’s like we lived nowhere in particular.
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.
COMFORT FOODS // Sik Fan – Kimi Canete
In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.
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.
ONE POEM – Paul Bavister
You slid the nit comb through my hair
then rinsed and laughed about how
you loved hunting them down
ESSAY | Initiation – Kate Stukenborg
I wanted to be a part of their club, their conversations, their laughter. Eating, I decided, was my way in.
FICTION | Rooms: A Love Letter – Annemarie McCarthy
Inside the atoms of the cavity block extension live the remnants of a thousand John Players.
DIGITAL ART – IJWBAA
Family is my way of honouring the Filipino spirit, where the bond of unity, the guidance of elders, and the hope carried by the younger generation come together to form a love that is simple, yet profound—one that transcends individuality and connects us all.
TWO POEMS – Simon French
For the good of the country we claimed their land & property. It was necessary for the people.
Porridge 