Sections | Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories | The Sun Magazine #6

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Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

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
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Some Notes On Fathers And Sons

I learned how to be a man by modeling the behavior of my father, and then other men. What I don’t know is how my son has modeled me, and that’s creating a commotion in my heart.

By Gary Percesepe July 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Beetle King

My chest, which was beginning to grow round in the wrong places, had to be hidden under a T-shirt no matter how hot or sweaty I became. Out in the desert I had to squat behind the cover of creosote bushes to pee. At home in my family’s Airstream I was my parents’ youngest daughter, but up in the paloverde I felt like one of the boys.

By Zoë Bossiere July 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

White Lines

We divided ourselves up until the teams were formed correctly, evenly. In other words, until the white kids were satisfied. No one had declared them the leaders, but, like most enduring traditions, the rule had become quietly understood, rooted in our fledgling muscles and minds.

By Emilio Carrero July 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Siri Tells A Joke

My husband had been sick long enough, a string of years, that I’d begun to think of his diagnosis as a rumor. He was interminably terminally ill. Until he wasn’t.

By Debra Gwartney June 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Fight Against Time

The desire to hang on to youth for as long as one could — to see that as greed was new to me, and the idea had deep implications for how I saw myself.

By Jim Ralston June 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Ten Years Sober

We all need to accept that the world at large is indifferent to our existence. Most of our decisions matter only to us. I could drink tonight, and no one would know.

By Joseph Holt June 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Heavenly Days

A glistening white steamship, launched in 1924, with an old-fashioned straight-up-and-down bow and tall single funnel from which billowed thick black smoke, it was, like my mother, an unapologetic citizen from a different time.

By Alex Jones May 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Without Ceasing

You never grew tired of watching her work. You loved the hum of the machine, the sawdust that stuck to her sleeve, and how she bent her head over the wood like something swan. You knew she was sharing something intimate with you. You were witnessing prayer.

By Sophie Ezzell May 2022