Category Archives: Nonfiction

by hipacificreview | 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 hipacificreview | 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 →

This One Dog

by Matthew R. K. Haynes

It was the nicest day in two weeks. High spring. Seventy-five, slight breeze. Winter had been long and painful, filled with an ended relationship and the keen fracturing that it brings. The park was loaded with parents donning tight faces, letting the sun release the grip of their own snowy fevers. Kids played on swings and monkey bars, rolled in the grass, and made new friends. I was playing tennis, an hour in, having won the first set with clean forehands, straight up the line. During the set break Sean, my tennis partner, tended to his seven-year-old daughter and their eight-week-old boxer, who played just outside the tennis fence. A man walked by carrying a guitar with his black and white spaniel. He unleashed her and threw a ball. A woman in a pink tank top walking three small dogs stopped to pet Sean’s puppy. A family with their motley-colored, floppy-eared mutt sat across the playground, eating sandwiches, drinking Gatorade. Continue reading →

And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness

by Gina Williams

Vinh Ho won’t tell me his mother’s name.

“It’s bad luck to say the name of the dead,” he says. “It could bring her ghost around.”

I don’t know if this is really true in Vietnamese culture or whether it’s something he believes for himself. But he says it while we stand there. He’s not any taller than me. We’re the smallest kids in high school. Continue reading →

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by hipacificreview | 06/04/2015 · 11:03 am

Home Break

by Stuart Ching

I surfed at Graveyards—a soft, hollow wave just beyond the Kuhio Beach breakwater. I’d paddle into a set, glide over the reef, and navigate the coral heads jutting from the water like tombstones. If I sped fast and far enough down the line, my momentum propelled me past the breakwater and around the pier, where the wave gathered into an inside section. Far from the enormous surf of O`ahu’s North Shore, the waves at Graveyards—even during the biggest summer swells—rarely topped the height of a man. Still, whenever I made that inside section, the bottom of the wave vanished, and in the space of my child’s imagination, I became the legendary tube-rider Gerry Lopez dropping into a fast-rolling barrel. Continue reading →

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