Category: Featured
Strangers at Birth
My mother wasn’t much of one. If you put aside the fact that she abandoned me, in the winter, less than twenty-four hours after I entered the world, then the note she left propped on my thin yellow cotton blanket said it all: Take her. I can’t do this. I Read more
Searching For Home
At night, after my day as a spice merchant concludes, the smell of garlic and onion dust coats my clothes and body like a new skin, as though I am someone different. I do not shower before visiting my parents, my scent melds with their age and confinement. My mother Read more
FROM THE LIFE OF IRIS ORIGO
(a cento, mostly) “The days go by waiting for better times.” I Day after day we sat in the library of our isolated country house, listening to the voices on the radio with an increasing sense of doom — Hitler and Dolfuss, Eden and Chamberlain, schoolchildren and soldiers singing Fascist Read more
Cowboy in Red is Cheating
1: The Heroine A funeral is lace, carnations, pinks, and old flesh. For Emma, dressing hurriedly for a grandmother’s send-off, it was going to be a showdown. Emma frowned as she did up pearl buttons on her white blouse. The yellow shirt had been too happy; the pink, too gentle. Read more
Loving a Dangerous Man
I read in a magazine that women fall in love for three reasons. We fall in love with the Hero, the Entertainer, or the Caregiver. So, was he the football hero, the clown at the party, or the guy who offered to carry your groceries? I fell in love with Read more
Party at the End of the World
The walls were as white as the cake box placed reverently on the mahogany oak dining room table. A few balloons in pastel green, violet, and lavender wobbled uneasily in the corners of the room like bubbles blown from a child’s toy. Cas felt the sudden urge to pop one. Read more