"Energia," the fourth song from Battiato’s 1972 debut album Fetus begins not with music but with Italian children either learning to speak or speaking.
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via Shutterstock
On the Friend of My Life
Part of growing up with someone is learning how to grow apart too. When we started high school we drifted a little. Our senior year we had anatomy together and became friends again. We spent every morning together in the commons area eating breakfast. Our friend, Emily, dubbed us "The Breakfast Club" and decided which characters from the film we were. The night we graduated we all rode together to the local movie theater still in our graduation regalia and we watched back to back movies before going home. My own family had pizza and gathered together, but we went out together instead. I still think about it a lot: the way friends become family.
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Terese Nielsen
Fact and Fiction Are Different Truths
When we hand over the responsibility of discerning the true from the false, we lose our ability to identify it ourselves.
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André Kertész
Creative Non-Fiction by Umang Kalra
Paris was blue – tired, sleepy dawn mushed into
slow sunset folded over a city that is laying itself open yet
hiding every part of it under bricks and light.
Yume No Ire via The Ardorous
Strawberry Rhubarb Jam
Because Pauline? She was dead. And it couldn’t have been her daughter because she had stopped by the day before she left and dropped off the secret recipe to Pauline’s strawberry rhubarb jam. That jam had been our family’s favorite for years, but until now, the only way we could have any was when she brought it to us in the summertime herself.
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Frederic Rivollier
Hungering
Let’s say that, as your mother’s story goes, you were born hungering. Let’s say you came into this world gooey-hot with blood and slick and before the howling inside could make its way up the ladder of your throat, to find grounding in your tongue, you conjured a boulder to block the chasm of your lips. To close out the vulnerable shadow of light. Let’s say your mother’s myths are truth, that your first act in this life was to shut up and look around: quiet, quizzical-eyed.
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A Daughter of Hemingway
My mother once told me that young girls who live without their fathers always seek a father. First we seek our real father, sometimes we seek our spiritual father second, but always we search for a father. I have learned that you cannot pin the word father to a man’s jacket and expect him to remember to answer to the title or even to wear the jacket. Uncles and grandfathers have stood in line for me to pin a title to and all have failed. So why not pin the title to a man I never met? One I’ll never meet.
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Elisa Scascitelli
On Fortune Telling
When I was little someone told me that only the devil could tell the future. Anyone who claimed to be a fortuneteller, anyone who seemed to know things before they happened, were that of the devil. I wondered if I would go to hell because I always knew things before they actually happened. My mother said that she didn’t know of such a verse and she said I was just lucky: She said I had a lucky "gift" of knowing possibilities and knowing truths before they materialized. It never felt lucky: it felt like rocks in the pit of my stomach dragging me closer to hellfire. I could ask myself is this really going to happen? And I would always know the answer. I felt guilty for having the gift of knowing.
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Daniel Vazquez
Second Goodbye, Non Fiction by Ron Gibson, Jr.
With other emergency room patients watching, I retched, filling and overfilling the tray. A janitor was sent for to mop up around my feet. The nurse brought over two trays this time, but it was the same story: I retched, filled, then overfilled them. The nurse and the janitor's body language seemed to indicate (at least to me) they were growing increasingly alarmed at the volume I was spewing.
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Matthieu Bourel
How to Be a Duplicitous Woman
Wake up one morning and see yourself, really see yourself in a mirror, in a window, in the blackened television screen.
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Self Portrait: Lindsay Wheeler
This picture makes me both a "threat" and deeply human at the same time. It displays a face of what the media calls "mentally unsound," because God forbid we ever give anything less than our best smiles. And so, we exploit our every ability to emotionally vacate; to put on a happy face when all is broken inside. We deserve more self-compassion. Is a picture "worth a thousand words" when it's only an illusion? This picture is worth a thousand more.
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Photograph by Mary Ann Thomas
Description: On one flight in the spring, I visited Denver for only a few days.
Non Fiction By Mary Ann Thomas: Today, I Fly
I started to hate flying. It took me a few years to say those words out loud, but when I did, I started to believe them. I hate flying, I thought, and I became someone who hated flying. The girl in me who always took the window seat and who gazed outwards at cloud textures and Lego cities, who loved the pull of her body against the seat back on take-off, and who always talked to the stranger next to her, was gone. In her place was a woman who said, I hate flying, and couldn’t explain why.
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Girlhood Ramblings
The way the last words spoken at a sleepover hang in the darkness. How it feels to wake up first. How your sleeping bag feels itchy-hot in the morning. How your insides feels itchy-hot, too. How your friends breathe in their sleep. Their messy hair. How the morning light is so orange-pretty you could cry.
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Rachel Lauren Photography
Fiction by Lydia A. Cyrus: Lycanthropy in Appalachia
I am a werewolf of sorts: awakened at night by a hunger and a desire to roam. I have spent most every night in the rain, snow, or just plain quiet walking alone in the dark. In Appalachia, we don’t talk about lycanthropy: we don’t talk about the crossing of identities where wolf meets woman. And yet, the people here will talk about me—will talk about the way I walk through the night and my darkness—and they will call it by any other name, any other affliction.
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L'uomo Vogue
What Being a Caulbearer Means to Me
Finding out that I was born with the caul was like having an epiphany. I didn’t know exactly what it was as I sat in the passenger seat talking about Romanian werewolves and Frankenstein teenage girls with my mom that day, but I knew it explained something about me. It made me feel validated.
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