One year later they’re the Miracle Boys again, lined up on the Campbells’ family room couch like they were in the hospital the day after the rescue. No questions allowed then, only a single photograph, the five of them laid out on their white cots like pale fish on ice. “Do you ever think back …
AJ Bermudez has come a long way since she was five-years-old and selling to her parents ‘novels’ folded from single sheets of paper. Her first book, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, winner of the 2022 Iowa Short Fiction Award and 2023 Lambda Award Finalist, is as every bit witty and real as she. …
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Nevermind that she is not the product of giants, my daughter Jessica is two years into adolescence—age fifteen—and has already grown to six-foot four. Her mother is an average-sized woman, much shorter than I am, and I’m firmly under six feet tall. But my grandfathers were tall men, over six feet the both of them, …
We were on the front porch waiting for the ambulance. Grandma, with her Alzheimer’s, didn’t know what she was waiting for. I watched her rocking in her wooden rocker, her bright and bewildered eyes going from my face to Grandpa’s (I’d called him PawPaw when I was a kid but switched to Grandpa about fifteen …
They poked at dripping garbage bags with blunt, white nails. They nosed squirrel carcasses in the street. They chased down mice and chewed them up on the spot, their yellowed teeth raised triumphant in the air. We hadn’t thought they liked food fresh, but we could see them in our gardens plain as the Lord’s …
I called Sissy after work about my living room. The interior wall had developed a soft spot near the ceiling, a sort of brownish smudge like a bruise on a peach. My aunt was good with structural matters, and I was hoping she’d have some insight. Instead, she had news of her own. “Your mother …
Donna’s husband had been underground for twenty-one hours, and she missed many things about him. She missed the sound of him humming in the bathroom; how when she said, “What are you humming?” he’d yell, “I’m not humming!” and then start doing it again. She missed his short-sleeved shirts against his hairy upper arms. She …
The wind has been fighting the cyclists ever since they entered South Dakota. A hurricane that tore up the Gulf Coast a week ago has made its way inland and is now reduced to simply battering Olivia’s cheek, relentlessly, with every pedal stroke as she makes her way east through the Great Plains. The hurricane …
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. —John Singer Sargent Portrait The first portrait Jules Johnson saw, really saw, was a watercolor she held in her hands in her uncle’s frame shop: a woman seated on a rock at the edge of a river. The subject’s shoes were off, her jeans …