Issue 563 | The Sun Magazine

November 2022

Readers Write

Tools

A father’s lesson, a son’s apology, a husband’s surprise

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

from Nickel And Dimed

What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace (and yes, here all my middle-class privilege is on full display) was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and — what boils down to the same thing — self-respect.

By Barbara Ehrenreich
Quotations

Sunbeams

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. . . . Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The Sun Interview

Invasion Of Privacy

Khiara M. Bridges On Poverty And Reproductive Justice

Three of the nine justices have publicly articulated their position that the Constitution does not contain a right to privacy — at least, when it comes to matters involving contraception. . . . And that’s just the three we know about.

By Feliz Moreno
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Ohashi Bridge In The Rain

When we met for lunch, she wore a dark silk dress and red lipstick. At the school where we both taught, she always dressed practically: plastic boots, a raincoat over a faded blue sweatshirt, a white sailor’s cap.

By Marilyn Abildskov
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Perfectly Built Spaces

To help me fall asleep at night, I try to think about soothing subjects. This is why, since I turned fifty several years ago, I have found myself renovating houses in my head. . . . I am particularly interested in renovating the houses of my childhood.

By Kelly DeLong
Fiction

Bottom Feeders

I feel close to Dad on the drive home, our legs mud-dry and tired, the tackle box between us, the pillowcase full of fish and ice. She’ll never admit it, but Mom will be impressed, I’m sure. In a million years she’d never guess how we caught so many. I’ll never tell.

By Peter Short
Fiction

Beachcombers In Doggerland

As he watches his daughter vanish in one direction and his wife in another, he thinks whatever it was that once held his family together has long since gone the way of that doomed landmass, swallowed by the sea.

By Miles Harvey
Photography

A Thousand Words

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

Photograph By Nicholas Small
Poetry

Five Months After My First Husband’s Death

My son posts a picture of himself at three years old / with his father, my first husband, / who still has black curly hair and is looking right out of the photograph / at me, as if he knew this day would come, me staring back / at him and wondering where that moment has gone.

By Colette Marie
Poetry

Farmhouse By The Highway

The hardest thing about death, my mother said, is when you stop remembering what drove you mad. Like the way my father typed one key at a time, or how he spit in his hands to smooth cowlicks in his hair.

By Matt Barrett
Poetry

He Arrived In A Hollowed-Out Studebaker Lark

We also had eyes for his car. You had to give up / all possessions to live here, George fine with that — / he’d just spent two cross-country months in the thing, / its front bucket seat removed for sleeping purposes — / and now an actual Lark was our newest town-runner.

By Rupert Fike