Category Archives: Nonfiction

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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Pogrzeby [Funerals]

by James Warren Boyd

Though the Laguna Beach hospital was familiar to me, the ICU was not. The entrance seemed like something out of a Cold War spy thriller, with its doubled-paned glass on thick doors, flat rectangle of steel covering the lock case, flashing lights, and wall-mounted phone. I picked up the handset, identified myself as the son of Eva Marie Boyd—so strange to use any name other than “Mother”—and was admitted with a loud buzz and the metallic thunk of the door being unbolted. The nurses’ station directed me to a room across from their administrative island. When I walked in, my Dad looked up me, his eyes puffy and swollen, and then back at my mother. I followed his gaze. A large tube, which stretched one corner of her half-opened mouth, jerked and hissed to initiate her chest’s rise and fall. I approached the bed and reached for her hand, getting tangled in the wire clipped to her forefinger. Continue reading

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Guns and Country

by Meg Thompson

“To him who is in fear, everything rustles.” — Sophocles

I grew up watching my dad aim at groundhogs out the kitchen window. This is to say, my parents are rednecks. There are many variations of redneck, and they are the quiet and meditative kind. You can tell because they rarely speak or leave their farm. My dad has spent most of his life smoking cigarettes in a field, staring at the heifers. My mom has spent most of hers wondering where my dad is. Getting a glimpse of them out in public is like sighting wolverines. Continue reading

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The Beaches Of

by Johnathan Harper

In the divide of pavement and sand stands a sign with a stick-figure drowning under white waves, the words: “Beware of Riptides.” Parents keep their children close, distract them with scarping shells from the strand, the salt grime wrapped to their fingers. Two brothers sit in ankle deep water, the one that’s seven has his arms wrapped around the waist of the younger to anchor him. They try to tug against the tide, where the ocean sucks them in, inch by heaving inch. Continue reading

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Something L.A.

by R. Dean Johnson 

Tom doesn’t know I’ve been avoiding him. It hasn’t exactly been a conscious thing. There wasn’t an argument or a last straw; I’ve had no epiphany or change of heart. It just sort of happened.

Really, we’ve always been semester friends—hanging out when classes are in session, rarely doing much together on spring, winter, or summer breaks. But now we’ve graduated, both with business degrees from a school that has a great reputation for engineering. There were a couple graduation get-togethers, high fives and handshakes, bottles of beer and the occasional shot, the grin and requisite, “We did it.” Then, nothing. A perpetual break. Continue reading

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