Nonfiction | By Rosanna Staffa
Lacrima Rerum
To read this essay, please purchase a print copy of Story #3, 2016
To read this essay, please purchase a print copy of Story #3, 2016
In Kishinev two boys came from the hotel to pick us up. They held out a sign with our names on it, nodded privyet, and walked us to a sporty red Fiat. Inside, the familiar rumble of ignition, then a blast of club music that got turned down. From our spot low to the ground …
To read this excerot, please purchase a print copy of Story #3, 2016
To read this story, please purchase a print copy of Story #3, 2016
I invite you to join the five and a half million people, including those in Greenland and the Faroe Islands, who speak Danish. It’s not that complicated—you don’t even have to conjugate verbs according to person, let alone gender—but it can be difficult to learn since the ethnic Danish population doesn’t expect foreigners to learn …
48 miles northwest In January of 2005 a mudslide covered the beachside town of La Conchita. Known as punta until 1925, it was founded in the late 19th century by men working on the South Pacific Railroad. The landslide destroyed thirty-six of one hundred sixty homes. Ten people died. The railroad still a vein running …
Like the cramped sushi bar I found in Kyoto packed with friendly businessmen and laughing smokers, and the independent Tokyo record store I found filled with collectible blues and jazz, I stumbled on Jazz In Rokudenashi by accident. It was a jazu kissa on a brick side street in Kyoto’s historic Gion-Shijō district. Jazu kissa …
Sarah McCord can’t quite remember when she discovered that PubMed was still calling conjoined twins “monsters.” She does, however, remember being startled. “It bothered me,” she wrote to me, “because it seemed like there were all kinds of news stories about conjoined twins being surgically separated, and I knew that there would be more searching …
Monsters are on the rise. People can’t seem to get enough of vampires lately, the giant monsters (Kaiju) are resurfacing, and zombies have a new lease on life. The reasons for this increased monster culture are hard to pin down. Maybe it’s social anxiety in the post-9/11 decade, or the conflict in Iraq—some think there’s …
When I was a child, there was a monster under my bed. It was there when I was born, and when I was old enough to move from my mom’s bedroom to my own it moved in with me. I thought sometimes that together we took up too much room, but neither of us wanted …