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Precarious

“Imagine if we’d known,” I said. “If you’d had a diagnosis, you could have been given lithium or something to help you.” Joan lifted her hands to her face and sobbed.

I Still Don’t Feel Free

I’m sick of being defined by the prison experience and long to be a normal human being with a past that doesn’t need to be discussed.

Sunbeams

Laws, it is said, are for protection of the people. It’s unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria, or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable. . . . A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Maine Escapes

The deckhand helps where he can. He flips a few lobsters right side up. He tucks a stray antenna away from the pinch of the crate’s hinges. The lobsters, when he holds them, emit a faint buzzing noise — sort of like a scream, if you think about it, and the deckhand does.

The Power Of Story

Jared Seide On How Listening To Each Other Can Restore Our Humanity

People want to celebrate the things that symbolize generosity and goodness in their lives. To share that with others and have others understand that this means something to you — that’s an extraordinary act of communion.

Stolen Time

Blind luck put me on this yard where the men have decided to make good use of the empty time forced upon us by the state. Yard A is downright peaceful, nothing like the prison yards where racist convicts stab and assault people.

Moving On

A mother’s memories, a child’s fears, a dead man’s secrets

Sunbeams

I learned a history not then written in books but one passed from generation to generation on the steps of moonlit porches and beside dying fires in one-room houses, a history of great-grandparents and of slavery and of the days following slavery; of those who lived still not free, yet who would not let their spirits be enslaved.

Mildred D. Taylor