by Kelsey Coletta
The music is drowning out our words and I want to scream louder. He’s seething, demanding to know why I left his side. I roll my eyes, sip my drink, bite my tongue and swallow the ache. Continue reading
Category Archives: Nonfiction
Disappearing Sands
by Julie Paul
In every wave, a multitude of yellow fish.
It’s November, 2017, and we’re in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. We watch the ocean from the wraparound lānai of Daylight Mind, a laidback cafe with good coffee and the wifi password “perfectview.” The ever-promised rain is falling, the first real rainfall in six days. A yellow-billed cardinal just visited for our muffin crumbs, and the scent from a foraged plumeria blossom beside my plate transports me back to high school. I wore frangipani essential oil on my wrists then, a strange coral pink elixir in a glass vial from the health food store. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
On the Shore of the Apocalypse
by Megan O’Laughlin
One of these days, I will find a dead body on this beach. It’s written in the stars, or at least in so many true crime stories: woman walking dog finds dead body on neighborhood beach.
Every morning I walk the new puppy to our small neighborhood shore where he sniffs seaweed while I hunt for sea-glass. I walk because I’m tired and my depletion comes from something that has a lot of terms: secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, all terms for various forms of caregiver exhaustion, definitions for intense weariness. I used to believe such symptoms indicate how I’ve given too much, but perhaps it means that the needs outweigh any possible gifts. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
A Palestinian Woman Holds Her Child
by Jona Whipple
She kneels at the edge of something, ragged dirt at the mouth of a hole you can’t see. Her arms encircle the bundle like this: One high around the shoulders, the other around the legs, palm hidden under the white bag. It is tied at the top, a crude knot like what I make with the handles of grocery store bags, a shredded tuft. She turns her face into the top of the bundle, where there is the shape of a head, a curve, the shroud pulling softly under her arms. Her lips move, she whispers into the primitive shell of the ear, she speaks softly through the cotton, her hands move, one rubbing softly at the shoulder, the other patting gently at the back of the legs. She rocks side to side, patting, whispering, her arms around this child in a hold like a figure eight, infinity, a hold recognized by mothers worldwide as the safest, the most secure. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Keith Richards and Rebel Yell
by Leslie Armstrong
My cousin Elspeth was always going on trips to exotic places in hopes of meeting an improvement over the two husbands she’d already had. One spring in the late ’80s, while on vacation, she met a possible candidate. They’d spent only an evening together, but he was a real estate lawyer practicing in Connecticut, clearly solvent, and, other than his thick south-Boston accent, which offended her Cambridge ear, he was indeed a prospect. Could she invite him to dinner so my husband, Dewey, and I could check him out? Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 