When I was a baby, my thighs were so chubby that one of my aunts used to eat them like drumsticks. It’s a story I heard often when I was growing up, usually told with the requisite giggles from my mother and a pinch on my legs from whomever else was within reach.
Category: Creative Nonfiction
Confession by Nancy J. Brandwein
I am the person who steams and huffs and rolls her eyes when you stand at the deli counter ordering half pound quantities of three different deli meats. I am the person who barrels through the bank door without turning around to say “thank you” while you hold the door open.
The Saint of Broken Bones by Cameron Witbeck
I can’t stop looking at you. You look like you do on the cross; but there’s no cross. It’s just you. You’re floating, arms spread out, reaching for the walls. There are holes in your hands but you’re smiling.
“Matthew Sweeney,” Father Bill calls from the front of the church, where he sits beneath your statue.
Home Court by Thalia Bardell
We always played before dinner, around 5 p.m. when it was not so hot and the black asphalt had cooled from the summer sun. Our feet could tolerate it and we went barefoot, calloused and dirty. We have the same feet, thick skinned under the heel and ball, similarity under the toes.
Scraping the Bottom by Nancy J. Brandwein
…We have dubbed him “radio dictator” for his insistence on having the radio permanently tuned to the local Oldies station. Yet, the music, which should provide a bouncy soundtrack for our family vacation, pushes me into treacherous territory—the gap between what I once thought my romantic life would be and what it has become.
Prologue: The Face in the Ceiling by Anthony Youn, M.D. (an excerpt of In Stitches)
What a pair. Double D’s. Poking up at me like twin peaks. Pam Anderson, eat your heart out.
Too bad they’re attached to a fourteen-year-old boy.
Searching by Angela Fan
I am amused by the chattering of my new classmates. The way they speak seems so precise, so different and so harsh. American English, I think, is weird. Chinese is so much better.
Real Unreal Things by Andrew David King
I was fourteen, and the rose was perfect. I’d engineered an equally perfect plan for the major opportunity my freshman-year Sadie Hawkins dance presented: one of the most admired girls in class had asked me—me?— to go with her. Over MySpace, sure, and we hardly spoke
Holy Tribunal by Jane Hammons
When I open the envelope containing a notice from the Diocese of Oakland that my EX of several years has petitioned for a Declaration of Invalidity, my first reaction is to laugh and toss the paperwork into the recycling bin. But the words toll like solemn bells throughout the day. Ecclesitasticum, Ajudication, Decree of Constitution. In the grip of the language as I had been some twenty years ago when I made the mistake of converting to Catholicism, I retrieve the paperwork.
Parting by Rachel Cann
He ordered a scotch and then broke the news that his appeal for a new trial had been denied. We were in the lounge of the Thunderbird Hotel in Miami, the baby upstairs in the room, asleep. “Twelve years. The judge threw the book at me. I did my best to charm him, but it didn’t do any good.” They’d used everything they could against him, including the time during the Depression when, at the age of five, he’d rapped another kid in the mouth with his shoe-shining kit for taking over his corner.
