Category Archives: Nonfiction

by | 05/12/2016 · 7:47 am

Whirling Disease

by Kelly Sundberg
(Originally appeared in The Denver Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 3)

Before:

We piled into a car, four girl-women in our early twenties, a tent, a cooler full of food, and plastic baggy full of magic mushrooms. The car wound along the tight curves of the river, canyon walls rising sharply on either side, sunlight filtering through the glass.

We stood in the middle of a stream, skirts tucked up around our waists, passing a fly rod between us and casting a line. The line flicked forward, hesitated gracefully in an arc before landing softly on the water. The cold stream funneled around us. We broke the arc of that glassy water. A silver glitter danced by my feet. A trout. It broke the surface, creating a circle on the smooth water, radiating into more circles, then slipping away soundlessly. Continue reading →

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by | 04/07/2016 · 9:27 am

Moloka`i Homestead, 1933

by Kirby Wright

The aina makes demands. Brownie’s thankful her husband built the bamboo shanty and filled it with axes, picks, shovels, and hoes. There are carpentry tools too: hammers, handsaws, a block plane, and chisels. She’s proud of her cinder block home overlooking the channel and the water tank on stilts the paniolos helped Chipper raise. She worries about the tank running dry and what will happen if Chip loses his Army pension. Driving cattle at Pu`u O Hoku Ranch made him mean, the kind of mean that turns everything good between a man and woman bad. Clearing trees brought hate when she matched him swing for swing. Now husband help is tough to come by.
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by | 11/19/2015 · 8:31 am

Hours

By Payton Cianfarano

Two-hundred-forty-seven hours ago you stopped talking. I should have known then that something was wrong, but this was the fourth time in one-hundred-sixty-eight hours that someone had warned me you were going to stop breathing. After the third time I stopped worrying. 

Two-hundred-forty-four hours ago I heard my mom crying, a sign that I should find my way to where she was and see what was going on. I found her wrapping herself around you so tightly that I’m surprised what you had left of a body didn’t break.

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by | 11/05/2015 · 10:09 am

The One Present Moment: Sharing Memories with the World’s Oldest Man

By Gabriel Furshong

When I met Walter Breuning, on the afternoon of September 6th, 2010, he was due to turn 114 in a fortnight, a feat accomplished by less than 100 people, and only six men, in human history.

We had arranged to meet at the Rainbow retirement home in downtown Great Falls, MT, where Walter had lived for nearly 30 years. Despite my early arrival, the chirpy receptionist informed me that he was already waiting in the lounge at the end of the hall. I could hear hammering and sawing in distant reaches of the building, and it was clear that remodelers had recently been at work in the lounge of the converted hotel. Sections of the floor were covered in plastic and sheets of dry wall lay stacked near the doorway. Continue reading →

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by | 09/21/2015 · 12:37 pm

Small, Safe Places

by A. D. Ross

I can’t stop changing apartments. No matter how nice the view, I’m always tempted away by the promise of some impossible place fit for Plato’s perfect forms.

When I was eighteen, I signed my first lease, a twelve-month rental in Richmond, VA. Eager to live in one of the historic, decaying city apartments, I pushed the honey hair away from my eyes and signed over the next year of my life. The apartment was cheap and walking-distance from the university where I attended art school. I didn’t bother over flooring, window treatments, or updated kitchen appliances. All I cared about was surviving on my wage working at the University Community Center. When I saw the high ceilings, the rustic wooden floors, I signed the papers without regard for the neighborhood’s reputation. Located in a notoriously bad area, my section of the street was referred to by the locals as “hell block.” Continue reading →

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