Category Archives: Nonfiction

by Jennivev Reyes | 02/26/2026 · 6:09 am

Grasshoppers

by Andi Boyd

My best friend and I used to tear the legs off grasshoppers. Worse, we also sometimes popped their bright bulbous eyes. That summer one of our parents had gone to Shopko and bought us a bright, neon kiddie pool to share. This was where we held our swimming lessons for the ladybugs not wise enough to hide. We were not very good instructors. Mostly, we drowned them in droves. When we flung our collection of insects from the side of the plywood that nested in the crevice of a dead tree—our tree house—into the pool below, we called it diving school. Though diving was not something either of us was brave enough to do yet. Our swimming days at Crossroads Health Club were spent mostly in the hot tub, where we begged the supervising adult to spin us around like we were cooked vegetables in a hot stew. I was a carrot. My best friend, potato. Continue reading →

Stranger

by Anna Scarpone

There’s a room alive with the heat of bodies, and a booming bass its ever-pulsing heart. Limbs press against limbs, flushed skin is illuminated only by the opening and closing of the bathroom door. Now and then, some shrieking, drunken laugh rings out over the crowd like a descant. In this darkness, I’m no more than a body. No sun casts a shadow on my face, revealing its familiar imperfections. Hidden is the bump on my nose, the freckle on my upper lip. The telltale inflections in my voice become another part of that universal chorus, the beat blasting from the DJ stand. In this ocean of bodies, we are all grasping desperately for anything, anyone to ground us. Continue reading →

House of the Sun

by Marisa Mangani

“People should know that Hawai`i is a country and should be respected as such. Because it was forcibly annexed to the United States does not mean that it is the US, except by conquest.”
– Alice Walker

I arrived on Maui from Oahu in 1971, an eleven-year-old sharing the back seat of my mom’s turquoise Maverick with my baby brother and cages full of yowling cats. Mom and Stepdad occupied the space up front, driving through the cane fields on the dusty, two-lane Mokulele Highway from the Kahului airport. They had bought us a house in a new subdivision in Kihei to start a new life away from the racial strife of Oahu, where haoles like me were being knifed in school bathrooms. (I had overheard Mom and Grandmother talking about this.) Continue reading →

If the Sun Has Legs

by Deborah Blenkhorn

“And whether pigs have wings.”
–Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

“It does so—the sun does so have legs!”

“Does not!”

“Does too!”

This was the subject of debate between cousin Callie and me, ages two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half respectively. My father and I spent a season with his sister Lila, her husband Mal, and their daughter on Prince Edward Island in the wake of my parents’ break-up back in Ontario. My father had grown up in the Maritimes (as indeed had my mother—they had been high school sweethearts in the small university-town of Sackville, New Brunswick), so perhaps this was a homecoming of sorts for him, though hardly a joyful one. I had spent each summer (and would continue to do so until way into my teens) with my grandparents on the New Brunswick side of the Northumberland Strait, so the Maritimes represented stability and comfort to me, too. Continue reading →

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Tagged as CNF, Creative Prose, Deborah Blenkhorn

by aenriquez44e99babd80 | 09/25/2025 · 6:11 am

Looking Into the Wind

by Eric Stinton

I watch the palm trees bend in the trade winds, as if they were riding in convertibles along the cliffs of the Kalanianaʻole Highway, their fronds like hair blowing back in the breeze. I yearn for their stillness, to let the world move around me, through me. I wish I belonged to the wind the way I want it to belong to me. But it comes and goes, belonging to nothing, while I remain.  Continue reading →

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Filed under Nonfiction

Tagged as CNF, Eric Stinton, Kailua Writer