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Heatwave
Nonfiction by Elizabeth Enochs The heat index is 113 when I take my lunch break and even on full blast my car’s AC is no match, and it’s not like I’m unaccustomed to heat — southeast Missouri rarely does “mild;” summers swelter and winters bite — but I’m thinking of those who don’t have AC,…
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The Trophy on My Wall
Creative Nonfiction by Don Alexander I was sitting on a log behind a makeshift blind I had fashioned out of dead limbs and brush. My Winchester 30/30 was resting on a horizontal limb just in front of me. This deer stand was thirty yards above a heavily used game trail in a little mountain hollow…
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Today, Your Secrets are Safe with Me
Creative Nonfiction by Cheryl Skory Suma It made me feel worse, talking about you as if we’d known one another. Everyone assumed we did; what mother and daughter don’t know each other’s stories? All I knew was how important today was for you; how much you needed the approval of the people in that room,…
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Rest
Creative Nonfiction by Dani Nichols The snow softens the sound of everything – the gate thuds instead of clanging, the horses’ feet clomp softly through the drifts. A week or two ago someone slid off the highway into a cow pasture – we heard sirens coming to help, but not the crash. Everything is muffled…
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What’s Mine and Yours
Creative Nonfiction by Sam DeLeo Our plan, if it could be called that, had been to catch a few long rides all the way to Los Angeles. Once there, we’d lounge poolside for the holiday weekend at the home of Will’s wealthy family, who were, according to him, direct heirs to the Hilton Hotel fortune.…
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She Leaves
Creative Nonfiction by Jennifer Robinson The elms on the grounds of this Mennonite school have been tied with bright orange ribbons and at first glance, she thinks they are marked for death. The city arborists use the same neon orange to paint a ring around trees infected with Dutch Elm, identifying the ones to be…
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10 Steps to Getting Rid of the Ghost in Your House
Nonfiction by Maureen O’Leary Give away the twelve boxes of your dad’s clothes your mom packed for their move to assisted living where he only survives nine days after finally, painfully dying in hospice care which is nothing like the blissfully drugged good-bye you swear he was promised. His last night in the hospital before…
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Throwing Pennies
Creative Nonfiction by Cassie Mannes Murray When the ultrasound technician adjusted the wand and said, “oop, it’s a boy” my first thought, the first thing I said to my partner in the deliberately shadowed room was, “how do we raise a non-toxic white boy in the South?” It was my immediate and most primary concern.…
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If It Plays in Peoria: A Glossary of Midwestern Survival
Creative Nonfiction by Megan Cannella saying, I used to date a lot of managers of strip clubs for a while verb meaning to have tried too much meaning to have cowered in ways that surprised you meaning to have smelled like fried food more frequently than is comfortable meaning…
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Sedona
Creative Nonfiction by Hannah Grieco After Elane Johnson After I found his index card on the activities board of the youth hostel. After I hitchhiked to an ATM machine to get two hundred dollars. After I packed for a four-day trip and locked up the rest of my stuff. After I got into his rusting…