The barn was lit by a single lightbulb. Cement floors dusted with straw, three by three stalls packed with chickens and goats. The first one to my right held two palm-sized puppies with their mother, her ribs looking like pretzels covered in caramel. She was the old man’s breeder, had watched at least a dozen …
This photo was taken on December 4th, the First Friday arts celebration of the month in downtown York. I had never been to the tree lighting ceremony in the city before, and when my boyfriend, Ryan, found out, he said going was a must. It was stunning: 40-ish feet of a healthy pine with lights the shapes of …
During my junior year at York College of Pennsylvania, my friends and I decided after we got back from semester break to build a gingerbread house. We were unable to see each other over the Christmas holiday, so we figured it would be a fun thing we could do together to celebrate. We listened and sang …
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. —Joan Didion, The White Album I was fond of Christmas as a kid, what with all the presents and candy and general atmosphere. It was a time of year when it was okay to eat too much, watch too much television, stay in one’s pajamas until dinner. …
…You ever get that instinct to call your friend anyway, warn her that you’re here on her stoop at 5:50 AM, but you never do it? Because you want to be those three knocks on her door in the first bruised hours of morning, that fizz of panic in her brain, is it the police …
Finding a Christmas picture took some digging. My family has never done greeting cards or family photos. We don’t have any special holiday traditions, except the standard presents underneath a tree on Christmas morning. However, thinking about it, I can’t actually remember the last time my mom, dad, sister, and I gathered around the …
[This is the first of a series of holiday story-pictures, or storyographies, from our editors and staff.] Christmas Eve. 2013. My daughters, Emma and Sophia, track Santa on Google Maps. “Daddy, he’s flying over China.” And he is—an animated sleigh, the reindeer, bouncing across the screen. “He’ll be here soon, Daddy.” There’s a calm in this moment, …
It’s God’s day, but I wear thigh highs beneath my Bible. Maybe that’s why He took my flock. My lambkin lost, I feel forsaken. I witness crooks and necks that crane toward this skirt impractical for tending sheep or even nailing up Have You Seen Me? posters… And so begins the chapter “Little Bo Peep Comes to …
The 2015 MLS Cup game is this Sunday, the final match-up of a long, grueling U.S. soccer season. To celebrate, an essay by Story co-founding editor Vito Grippi about the narratives soccer offered him as an American child of an Italian immigrant family. WHAT WE CALL SOCCER IS USUALLY CALLED FOOTBALL. That’s what the English call it. Though …
Today we are cheating a bit with a book technically published nine months ago, but it’s Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band, and the real publication date for any rock-n-roll memoir is the paperback one, because you can’t roll a hardcover and shove it in your back pocket. Dey Street Books releases the paperback edition of Girl …