Browse Topics
Mental Health
Indecision
“Whether you go up the ladder or down it,” / says the Tao, “your position is shaky.”
March 2026Butt-Dials
“How are you?” Janice asks her brother, because what do you say to someone you didn’t choose to call except the same thing you say to everyone?
February 2026
Unruly
I’m rebellious, defiant, so I’m sent to the barn, driven there by my newly single mom, or my newly single dad, or my grandparents, or someone else. Another parent told my mom I should try horseback riding. Ice-skating and tae kwon do and ceramics didn’t stick, but I can already tell I’m a horse girl.
February 2026
Waterfall
Sex, to me, was like a solvent, cutting through layers of everyday grime. Without it, irritations accumulated with no way of wiping the slate clean; disappointment coagulated into distress. I felt forlorn, restless, and disconnected. Yet no matter how many times I sounded the alarm, my husband never seemed to hear me.
January 2026
Celebrating
A fiftieth anniversary in Paris, a COVID Christmas in April, a first birthday in America
December 2025
Rough Road
Beat from cycling around town all morning collecting rejections, I scarfed down a fast-food burger that settled into my gut like wet plaster. I just wanted to sit in the air-conditioning and pretend things were going to be OK, but a kid in his polyester uniform started slinging ammonia water from a mop bucket, and the smell made my sinuses hurt.
August 2025
The Tap Out
I want to say that when Gavin told me he would kill me, I did not believe him, though there was nothing to suggest he was bluffing: He held me down in bed, his hand on my throat, knees locked around my waist, the alcohol-induced sheen to his blue eyes suggesting he could commit to his words without much thought. But the fear I should have felt—that I had felt minutes before, when I was running around, trying to escape him—was gone. I was gone. I had retreated into what the two of us referred to as my “shutdown mode.”
June 2025
Zuma
When you get to your father's bedroom, you see Dad shaking like a freshly fumigated bug. Your brother is by his side on the phone, his face red and sweaty, like when he's been skateboarding all day.
April 2025
Thievery
I was sure I'd heard our front gate squeal and rattle. We live on a tree-lined Chicago street where 6 AM on Sunday is the time for arriving home from the night shift or heading out to the early shift or, in the case of a very few early risers, walking a dog.
April 2025
Tart
After the massage I take myself to lunch. I eat a passion fruit tart. It’s delicious—sour and sweet both in perfect balance. Its perfection makes me angry. The filling is bright yellow. I watch my fork pick up the yellow and the crumbs. I am too focused on this tart. I wonder if I have been worrying so much that the worry muscles in my brain are now broken, permanently sharpened to a point of attention that is useless now, an ambulance siren for no one.
March 2025
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