Tag Archives: CNF

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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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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Apples

by Mollie Hawkins

1. When he started his job at the organic grocery store, Produce Man brings me apples with names like poems: Pink Lady. Ambrosia. Gala. American Beauty. He brings me the sweet ones he knows I will like.

2. I know three kinds of apples: Red Delicious, the mouth-puckering Granny Smith, and whatever bitter kind grows on my grandmother’s trees in the Alabama woods.

3. Produce Man and I don’t feel like grownups. We slip in and out of college, like we are window shopping at a luxury department store. Work schedules and school schedules do not overlap on our Venn diagrams. Continue reading

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That Week at the Beach

by Dana Gynther

That week at the beach, my family began to unravel. Well, not the kids, they were oblivious as children often are, and made of stronger stuff. The teenagers were preoccupied with sneaking out to smoke cigarettes and meet boys while the under-twelves were a typical gang of summertime cousins wrapped up in their own world. None of them noticed the adults. Continue reading

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Lolita Floats Still in Miami

by B.M. Owens

Imagine swimming in a pool. No, imagine living in that pool. Imagine that pool being all that exists in the world to you. The pool is your world and your world is 35 feet wide and 12-20 feet deep. You are 20 feet long and swim in constant circles as children bang on the see-through glass tank. High pitched whistles sound and you breach but you’re not sure why. You’re given food. That’s why. You continue your circles, you’re making something. The water laps around the sides. Your fins guide the water with incantations others don’t understand—you don’t really understand them either. You swim and swim and you’re still here, swimming. A whirl pool forms at the center. This is it—You charge toward it, hoping the water sucks you in. That it’ll tear holes into the bottom of the tank—into reality. That it’ll pluck and sweep you into deep waters. That it’ll bring you home out to the Pacific ocean or, at least, drown you. But it doesn’t. The water settles. Your body is stiff as you float beneath the Florida sun. Maybe if you’re still enough the heat will melt your blubber and you can ooze out of here through the drains. The sun only blisters your skin but you don’t seek shade because you already know there isn’t any. This is all there is—this pool is your world. Continue reading

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