Sections | Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories | The Sun Magazine #2

Browse Sections

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

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 October 2022
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 October 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Their Last Argument

I picture my father, dead a dozen years now, reaching from the great beyond to tap me on the shoulder. “What do you want, Pa?” I ask. “Look,” he says. “I’ve been practicing my moonwalk.”

By Peter Murphy September 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Thistle Steps

I have recently made a new enemy. She is a black, curly-haired cocker spaniel walking a man holding a leash. We pass each other sometimes on the steep, narrow public stairs called the Thistle Steps. . . . I could try talking to the man, but I’m never wearing my hearing aids when we meet, so I wouldn’t be able to hear his reply.

By Elana Kupor September 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Private Thing

People laugh about pubescent horniness and untimely erections, but nobody talks about getting them before puberty on a regular basis. I was aroused whenever nothing was demanded of my limbs or mind — in class, at church, on the bus, in the car. Once, I even got hard at football practice while staring off at the Catskill Mountains and half-assing my way through groin stretches.

By John Scotto September 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Messages

In the months following Mom’s death in February 2021, I tried to get her to say something to me, to speak to me. If anyone could communicate from beyond, I thought, it was her.

By Morgan Talty August 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Luminescence

In the backseat on long car rides home from my grandmother’s house in southern Illinois, I cataloged light sources in the dark: gazing at flare towers burning above oil wells, watching the taillights of faster cars shrink to pinpoints, following the sweep of flood lamps up the domes of concrete grain silos.

By Steve Edwards August 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Bat Season

These were strange and intoxicating expeditions. At the cliff-lined ends of forest-service roads or the edges of muddy cattle tanks, or in the cricket-loud groves where saguaros gave way to oaks, I would help stretch nets on moonless evenings. Bats fluttered into the thin weave and were trapped, toothy and screaming.

By River Reyes August 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hey, Man

You’d donated most of your organs, so the body in your coffin was basically a scarecrow version of you. . . . Thank God they don’t do brain transplants, I thought. Anybody who’d gotten your brain would’ve woken up from surgery a total asshole. I heard you laughing at this. I could remember your laugh really well. It was a letdown that I could hear it only in my head.

By John Scotto August 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Grief Almanac For An Apocalypse

To live long enough in this world means to learn to nestle the twins of grief and hope in your arms. I tuck the bottle of fertility medication next to the black dress I bought for my mother’s funeral. We plant a white pine in the yard, in view of the window of our empty nursery.

By Jacquelyn Gill August 2022
What Do You Think? We love getting letters to the editor for our Correspondence section.
Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark?
Send A Letter