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
Tag Archives: Creative 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
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
Seek and Ye Shall Find
by Shawna Ervin
Lost
1984. Scott Hamilton won the Olympic gold medal for men’s figure skating in Sarajevo that February. He trained at a rink near where I lived with my parents and younger brother. I was nine, in third grade. I hadn’t paid attention to figure skating before, and probably hadn’t paid much attention that year either. My parents were conservative Christians. TV—like the radio, movies, alcohol, smoking, dancing, and anyone outside of our small, fundamental world—was to be feared and avoided at all costs. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 