My father died thirty-seven years ago. I didn’t eulogize him at his funeral. I couldn’t. As a young man, I was too filled with rebellion and resentment to see what he was trying to show me. I only saw what he lacked, and his sad efforts to inflate what he thought he had to offer by aggrandizing parts of his life story. It was hard for me to determine what was true and what was not, which blinded me to the fact that no aggrandizement was necessary. I gathered from the little he said about … Continue reading Eulogy For My Father by E. H. Jacobs→
While cleaning out our storage room of old magazines, financial records that might should be in a safe deposit box, worn out bed sheets, and a fifty-year accumulation of the miscellaneous, I found several small paper boxes that our grandchildren had made when in middle school. They were products of a three or four week fad among their friends. They represent a wonderful example of learning by observing, by doing. This method is the fundamental way of accruing knowledge: I am speaking of an intimate relationship between human teacher and the student learner. Those same … Continue reading Reverse Engineering by Fred Wilbur→
I was born on Halloween, quarter past three in the morning, jaundiced and with a hole in my heart. Or so Mum told me, but she was grumpy about what a pain I had been, so I didn’t push for details. All Hallows’ Eve—hallow meaning saint—is the night before All Saints’ Day on November 1, and is when the departed and beloved are remembered through prayer and song (vespers being Latin for evening). The practice goes back centuries, and includes a rich Celtic influence and history. We knew none of this growing up in Southeast … Continue reading Halloween’s Child by Ping Yi Yee→
A ten foot giraffe. A ballerina on tiptoe. A gyrating rocker. The Angel Gabriel and an Artist in the Time of Covid. These are but a few of the playful and thought-provoking metal sculptures by New England artist Madeleine Lord. Lord remembers how her love of sculptures began. “In 1983 a widowed friend with poor eyesight wanted to attend the night welding class at the technical high school and needed a driver. I wanted to learn to weld so off we went.” She was hooked, accustomed to creating paintings and woodcut prints. “Welded … Continue reading The Intriguing Metal Sculptures of Madeleine Lord→
On some days, the world stops moving and I feel I’m sitting on a wooden chair inside a still life painting. I look at the objects around me in my living room—the navy blue fabric recliner, music magazines on the coffee table, the wooden perch near the window where Sophie, my black cat, sleeps. The painting on the wall of the Mist Trail in Yosemite by my mother before she faded into dementia—the rocks, trees, and waterfall dissolving into colors—magenta, light blue, crimson, shades of charcoal gray, and forest green. The red coffee cup, the … Continue reading Still Life by Mark Liebenow→
Going to visit a dead body has seemed bizarre to me since my first such occasion when I was five or six years old. Like any good Southern family, we had seemingly countless numbers of old ladies populating the family tree. Most of them were a little scary, I thought. They were somebody’s second-cousin-twice-removed or a great-aunt or Neva’s mother-in-law, someone whose life and death had little bearing on my life. But Mom and Daddy took me with them to the funeral home for the Visitation, an occasion taken very seriously in my family. We … Continue reading Paying Our Respects by Connie Clark→
The shuffling of Zhao Yihe, my boss, down the office corridor came to a shocked halt when he saw me. With his hair wet, his feet in plastic slippers and a towel draped around his neck, he must have come from the bathhouse at the back of the office compound. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were shower days for men, and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for women. “Did you miss the bus?” he asked. “No, I’m eating lunch here now, downstairs,” I replied. Foreign experts like myself normally took a private bus back to our hotel … Continue reading All Out in Beijing by Marcia Yudkin→
We were privileged again to read a vast expanse of small worlds through our flash fiction contest. And once again, the different structures and backstories and characters made the subjective task of landing on overlapping favorites difficult work. There is no scientific formula for evaluation. Just two hearts touched in one way or another. All of which is to say we are honored to announce that “The Cat and The Man,” by Laura Halpin was awarded first and Daniel Lowe’s “Mosaic,” second. They are both wonderful. Thank you, thank you to all who sent in … Continue reading 2026 Flash Fiction Contest Winners by Erika Raskin and Mary Esselman→
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. —Charles Darwin,Voyage of the Beagle There is some question as to Definition’s whereabouts, its opportunity, its motive: our mystery character in an imagined scenario. The first place to look for the culprit is in the dictionary (any Google search will do.) You probably would begin such a search by typing “definition of ‘definition’?” It has, however, multi-faceted explanations (and I’m more or less quoting now): 1) the act of defining or … Continue reading Looking for Definition by Fred Wilbur→
Mahmoud Elmardi, a Sudanese visual artist and novelist currently based in Cairo, explores how physical and spiritual landscapes overlap, his aim to document the subtle nuances of cultural heritage and displacement. “My artistic roots run deep into the 1990s, specifically in Bahri, a historic district of Khartoum, Sudan,” Elmardi remembers. “As a child, I didn’t just paint what I saw; I channeled mythical figures from my imagination, heavily influenced by the classic animation of that era—shows like The Adventures of Sinbad and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This early obsession unexpectedly led to my winning a children’s … Continue reading The Vibrant Paintings of Mahmoud Elmardi→
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