Rigel Oliveri is the 1st place winner of Streetlight‘s 2023 Essay/Memoir Contest It was late on a Saturday night. My son, who had just turned nine, woke up screaming. He had localized abdominal pain on one side. I couldn’t even touch his tummy without provoking screams. Although just thinking about the cost of an ER visit made me feel sick, this seemed serious. I woke my six-year-old daughter up and told her we had to go. Like a trooper, she threw a few books and some markers into her pillowcase and tossed it over her … Continue reading Find the Difference by Rigel Oliveri→
Two 584-million-mile trips around the sun—the only traveling any of us could do. Two sets of birthdays and anniversaries and seasonal accoutrement. Innumerable sleepless nights. All spent in pandemic hibernation. In terror. On the brink of insanity. It’s fitting that they’d bring me back. Just like they always have. When the clarion call came, it rattled like a cruel tease. After one cancelled tour and another doomed returning-to-normal show amid countless are-we-there-yet moments, the prospect of real-life anything seemed out of reach. I wasn’t ready anyway, still subsumed by a pandemic-induced Stockholm syndrome. But as … Continue reading Return to Civilization by Elizabeth L. Delaney→
My favorite photograph shows my children trudging through a cold, whispering creek hand in hand. The afternoon light filters through the canopy, refracting across the lens in an angelic glow. The girls are still little. Our youngest wears a heavy diaper that skims the surface of the shallow water. The energy is electric. Magical. The waterway bubbles and winds along the border of our property, cutting a five-foot canyon into the red-clay earth. Along the bottom, the creek ripples over slick stones and fallen trees, which hide red salamanders and tiny fish. A small stretch … Continue reading In the After by Sarah E. Laughter→
It’s a pleasure—and also a great privilege—to announce the winners of this year’s Streetlight Essay/Memoir Contest. This year’s submissions made an admirable crowd; it wasn’t easy to pick only three winners. We’ll be posting some honorable mentions too, but more about that later. Now is the time to consider the winners. First prize goes to Rigel Oliveri for her essay, “Find the Difference,” a brief, but harrowing and touching, account of one day in the life of a single, widowed mother facing a medical emergency. It’s a story that throws a light onto the perils … Continue reading We Celebrate Our Winners by Susan Shafarzek→
Framed on my mother’s real estate office desk was a small poster from the ‘80s. Twenty years later, it was still there in a space where a family portrait might have been. It pictured a well-coiffed woman with a sarcastically smug aristocratic sneer, a champagne glass in one hand and a riding strop in the other, dressed as to the manor born: tweed jacket, cravat, English riding pants and knee-length boots, one resting on the bumper of a Rolls Royce, parked in front of some grand estate. The image illustrated the caption: Poverty Sucks. This … Continue reading Poverty Sucks by Scott Hurd→
“To Live Until . . . ” Many know the rest of the title: “We Say Good-Bye.” It is from Kübler-Ross’s well-known book about terminal patients, how some manage to live fully, how we all can learn to face death heroically and emerge like butterflies from cocoons. The day Mom was diagnosed with congestive heart failure marked a turning point: she could resign herself to the inevitable and “go gentle into that good night,” or embrace the abyss, and live purposely ’till the end. Hungarians are famously known for their melancholia, and for decades Hungary … Continue reading A Case of Spiriting by T. J. Masluk→
Many, oh, many, many, years ago, a friend and I took a plane trip to Minneapolis, Minn. It was not a first flight, but it was a first time west for both of us. Our flight began in Newark, N.J. This friend believed, or professed to believe, that airplanes only stayed in the air because the passengers kept willing it to do so. Perhaps she was being facetious, but in any event, that was probably our only worry. In those days, no one searched your luggage and the rows of seats seemed not to be … Continue reading A Very Small Adventure by Susan Shafarzek→
We first met holding hands at the outdoor Saturday market, vendors selling tie-dyed tee shirts and us eating foods that seemed exotic to me, like yakisoba noodles and teriyaki chicken. You revealed an existence better suited for me—one that lay beyond the endless berry fields and tractors and crippling solitude of my rural childhood. Although our time together was limited, you were the first city I ever knew, dear Portland. And my love for you was instant and deep and true. Remember how, when I was in high school, I tried to visit you as … Continue reading Dear Portland: a Love Letter to My Childhood Sweetheart by Melissent Zuwalt→
Fifteen years ago, I knew that moving to the Midwest would be a kind of culture shock. I knew it because I googled “Regional Food of Michigan” and the first thing that came up was “cereal.” But I didn’t know then what I know now, that Midwestern Nice was going to be the real shock. I always felt shy growing up on Long Island. Part of that shyness was that I was an outsider from the start. We started our lives as a family in Palo Alto, Calif., where I was born at Stanford University … Continue reading Culture Shock by Rachel Lutwick-Deaner→
I reach for a glass jar of sweet gherkins and notice the same unfamiliar woman is following me down another aisle in the grocery store. I wonder if it is a coincidence. My gut tells me otherwise. The wavy-haired woman is looking down at her phone. Moving toward her, I pretend to search for stone ground mustard. I am now close enough to see she is on social media. Startled I am so near, she stammers, “You, you, you look familiar.” I look at her and know I have never seen her before, unless I … Continue reading I Don’t Miss You When You’re Not With Me by Bridget Verhaaren→
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