Tag Archives: CNF

by Jennivev Reyes | 02/26/2026 · 6:09 am

Grasshoppers

by Andi Boyd

My best friend and I used to tear the legs off grasshoppers. Worse, we also sometimes popped their bright bulbous eyes. That summer one of our parents had gone to Shopko and bought us a bright, neon kiddie pool to share. This was where we held our swimming lessons for the ladybugs not wise enough to hide. We were not very good instructors. Mostly, we drowned them in droves. When we flung our collection of insects from the side of the plywood that nested in the crevice of a dead tree—our tree house—into the pool below, we called it diving school. Though diving was not something either of us was brave enough to do yet. Our swimming days at Crossroads Health Club were spent mostly in the hot tub, where we begged the supervising adult to spin us around like we were cooked vegetables in a hot stew. I was a carrot. My best friend, potato. Continue reading →

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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Filed under Nonfiction

Tagged as CNF, Creative Prose, Deborah Blenkhorn

by aenriquez44e99babd80 | 09/25/2025 · 6:11 am

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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Filed under Nonfiction

Tagged as CNF, Eric Stinton, Kailua Writer

by tmielkesuizu1 | 02/27/2025 · 6:15 am

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 →

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 →