Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash. I. a. This morning, I saw a creature standing in the road. The size of a small dog with rust-colored fur. But even from a distance, I could see electricity shuddering just beneath its skin. A taut wildness that disappears with domesticity. b. For years now, I’ve lived in the West, in places that once were desert. Where the air is dry, and the bugs are few and no one cares quite so much if you graduated from one of the Ivies. Sometimes, I return East in August and … Continue reading Fragments From Returning to the Suburban Neighborhood of My Youth by Sharon Gelman→
I should have turned on the porch light, but the bulb is dead, I said, I had to leave her alone in the bathroom so I could stand outside and watch for the ambulance because the porch light is out, I wasn’t certain the EMTs would find the house, but she’s in the bathroom, on the toilet and can’t stand, while I was teaching a class tonight, she phoned the evening coordinator who stood at the classroom door and softly told me she needed me, but I don’t understand why a firetruck is at the … Continue reading Last Words by Caroline Malone→
What’s happening to me? Downstairs I can hear my wife Ann with our two-year-old Isabella, their sounds bubbling up from the kitchen. The scrape of spoon on bowl. The cooed urgings: Another bite? Zoom zoom! Izzy’s delighted yawp. But for some reason I can’t go down the stairs. Every time I try, lowering my right foot onto the top step, the padded carpet giving way, I start to lose my balance and heave myself back up, almost knocking the wedding photo of my mom and dad off the wall. I feel groggy like I’ve … Continue reading Downstairs by Gary Duehr→
I wanted to write about hunting season here in the rural countryside, the howling packs of dogs, the men and women who sit in muddy trucks on the side of the road with loaded guns, waiting, and the orphaned black bear cubs. I also wanted to write about my Mississippi cousin who transported cross-country in the back of his Toyota pickup, a taxidermied bear’s head bagged on a Native American reservation in New Mexico. But October calls me, like the wild and wild things, to write about my wild nephew. He will be turning twenty … Continue reading Call of the Wild by Trudy Hale→
Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · Still Life with Black Pants and Peppers by Christine Tucker Podcast: “Still Life with Black Pants and Peppers” is a short fiction about endings and new beginnings. A fictional story performed by Jennifer Sims. Read the story online: “Still Life with Black Pants and Peppers” by Christine Tucker Jennifer Sims is an actor and voice over artist who has voiced hundreds of projects across all genres. After attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts she wandered into a career in advertising. She worked as an ad agency … Continue reading Still Life with Black Pants and Peppers by Christine Tucker→
“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→
I left my body, my home, and my life at 5:14 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon in May, just as the peonies outside turned their faces upward and smiled their brightest smile. One minute I was cutting up peppers and onions for a stir-fry, and the next minute I was on the floor clutching my chest, trying to catch a breath. It took no time at all, and it took forever. My grandmother came to get me. She was still her tiny, red-headed, no-nonsense self. She held out her hands and picked me up … Continue reading Still Life with Black Pants and Peppers by Christine Tucker→
He’s in one of my rooms. I pay attention to it now, because his window is closest to the nurses’ station and faces the automatic doors I push my cleaning cart through. I see him as soon as the doors breathe open and the negative pressure ruffles the gown’s paper against my clothes. Everything’s faster in here, no time to catch up on anything or anyone, other than the dying. I stay out of everybody’s way and clean wherever they aren’t. When I peek in his room, the machines and tubes are still at it, … Continue reading Like Savion by Bess Wiley→
The gravedigger called, annoyed that I was not at the cemetery where he was waiting to lay my father’s stone marker. I’d expected his call en route and said I would get there as fast as possible. It was a steamy, late summer day some years ago and the cemetery was a 15-minute drive. My father’s ashes were encased in a black plastic box beside me. He’d died in 2000 and since then, the heavy, half empty container had collected dust in a corner of my office. He’d requested the scattering of his … Continue reading Guarantees by Elizabeth Meade Howard→
To be no more; sad cure; for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through Eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion? John Milton, Paradise Lost In the middle of the night, my husband sat up; he’d been coughing too much and I’d been lying awake listening to his rasping breathing. His doctors understand as much as anyone about his little-known lung disease, but that’s not saying much. They’d ordered an oxygen tank which … Continue reading Memento Mori by Melissa Knox→
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