Reckon Review

Category: Nonfiction

  • Coke Bottle / A Burro’s Tale / Fried

    A Small Town Triptych Creative Nonfiction by Charlotte Hamrick Coke Bottle One day Mamma walked in my room and said A body could balance a coke bottle on your butt. She didn’t say if that was good or bad and I didn’t ask. I remember this because Mamma didn’t talk to me directly too much.…

  • Imaginary Deaths

    Creative Nonfiction by Stephanie Parent Here is what I remember: The little orphan Heidi separated from her grandfather in Heidi, the Shirley Temple version. I watched the movie one morning before preschool, and then refused to go. My mother let me stay home. Littlefoot’s mother, victim of both a Tyrannosaurus rex and an earthquake in…

  • The Finch Hunter

    Creative NonFiction by Barlow Adams My sister had painted the kitchen a sickly green and her meatloaf was dry. The onions in it were too big and there were too many of them. It was mama’s old recipe. It was only old now because mama died a year ago. Before then, it was just mom’s…

  • Polish

    Creative Nonfiction by Meredith McCarroll Box turtles lived in the woods above our house. Our dog, Alphie, roamed the neighborhood and returned home covered in spurs, with muddy paws and snout, with bloated ticks standing on end. Alphie carried these turtles to the front door and dropped them gently for us to see. Mom found…

  • Sweet Fruit

    Creative Nonfiction by Karen Luke Jackson You ate that first one and its flesh was sweetLike thickened wine: summer’s blood was in itLeaving stains upon the tongue                                       Seamus Heaney, “Blackberry-Picking” The summer my mother was five, she and her older brother Buck went blackberry picking. Working along a fence row, they filled a pail and a cup…

  • Princess Visitation

    Creative Nonfiction by Linda Parsons Digging in my drawer of ‘unmentionables,’ as ladies used to say, I thought an old camisole would work. Covid has taught me to make do or do without. I wasn’t about to lose my garden tomatoes to the birds’ swift strike, which opens them to wormy ruination. I had no…

  • If Wishes Were Fishes

    Creative Nonfiction by Susan Fuchtman I I took Andy and walked to some friends’ homes, just a morning out, so we weren’t there when the UPS man dropped off the package, his last stop. On his drive home, on the curve approaching the grain elevator in Page City, a gust of wind blew over his…

  • Redbud in the time of pandemic (Spring 2020)

    Creative Nonfiction by Marianne Worthington I. Just about this same time last year, while driving north in on Interstate 75, I saw that the highway crew had mowed down all the flowering redbud trees to widen the interstate. The sight of all that shocking pink uprooted from the earth and being piled up for burning—for…