Issue 178 | The Sun Magazine

September 1990

Readers Write

Refuge

Having a room of one’s own, eating compulsively, scribbling

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others to your own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Dignity And Other Staples

Eating In The Soup Kitchens Of Seattle

On my rounds of the soup kitchens, I learned more than fine distinctions among bad foods. I learned the patience engendered by interminable waiting. I learned the deferential glance, a useful grace that gets one past the guards unchallenged.

By David Grant
Fiction

Darrell

I liked my truck. I liked to put all my blocks in the back and cart them from room to room. But I loved Merry’s doll.

By Andrew Ramer
Fiction

Rooms

Fatima remembers the infant eyes closing against the first handfuls of dirt. She stopped moving almost immediately, as if the sheerest blanket of earth were too heavy.

By Diana Abu-Jaber
Fiction

Without Cost Or Obligation

We went past the Allied checkpoint, past the American, the Brit, and the Frenchman, past the sign in more languages than we could read — YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.

By Donald N. S. Unger
Fiction

In The War-Torn Heart Of The House

Bucky, it’s Tuesday, May 9. I’m in the records vault using the old IBM to hammer this one out to you, my dictaphone account of how it went the last night at our house and about my return to Trent (still minimum security).

By Scott Warren Taylor