Issue 557 | The Sun Magazine

May 2022

Readers Write

Cooking

With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

Love And Death Among The Molluscs

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger.

By M.F.K. Fisher
Quotations

Sunbeams

Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart.

Michael Pollan

The Sun Interview

The Carnivore’s Dilemma

Wyatt Williams On The Moral Conundrum Of Killing And Eating Animals

We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that because we went to Whole Foods and bought the organic product, we’re not participating in suffering and death.

By Finn Cohen
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Valley Between

I could feel the losses of my past lurking nearby. Not just animals but other losses, too. They exhaled from the piles like human whispers.

By Alexandra Ford
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Memory Of Clay

For all Dad’s skill with wood and tools, his life was sloppily built. Some sorrow whose origins I can’t name led him to consistently misread the ruler. What does a son do with the wreckage of his father’s life forty-six years after his death?

By Bruce Ballenger
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Every Baby Needs To Be Rocked

I want to help carry the burden when it is heaviest. The dying patients and their families need time with a compassionate stranger: someone they don’t have to expend their fragile energy to try to support or protect.

By Barbara Woodmansee
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Guide To Home Acceptance

“Home improvement” always entails physically fixing up one’s house. But what about the emotional work of homeownership? One way to improve your home is through gratitude and acceptance. Does everything constantly need to be “fixed”?

By Sparrow
Fiction

Good Housekeeping

How could she tell her son that although she bathes, puts on clothes, laughs at Colbert, and has conversations with people, people don’t know. They don’t have a clue they’re talking to a bunch of scattered molecules trying to imitate a human being.

By Daniela Kuper
Photography

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Photograph By Wendy Stone
Poetry

Haunted

Mouse angels I have called them, / terrifying and warm and mythical, / seeming almost terrified themselves, / skittering after the echoes of / their own voices homing in / on the smaller creatures of the night

By Dan Gerber
Poetry

What I Didn’t Say

And I didn’t say there is no philosophy of life that covers this / I didn’t say how am I supposed to breathe when you stop

By Beverly Hartz