Nonfiction

By My Own Hand

Mental anguish can be as unruly as any terminal illness. It can, unfortunately, orchestrate its own end.

IN THE MARGIN

For many years I refused to be an exile, claiming that I am an immigrant, someone who chose to move to a new country voluntarily.

The Only Fat Man in Lascahobas

Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.

Lone Wolf

‘That’s just how he is, our dear doctor,’ people would say, and by this would they meant that it was this very energy that had sent him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a member of Iceland’s water polo team, and later to escape from occupied Denmark on a leaky old fishing boat…

The Family Farm

It didn’t feel wrong because I chose to do it. When I was home from university, I continued in this way, carrying a sharpened coal shovel and leather gloves, or my mother’s .22 Ruger handgun.

issue 38 2020 Prize Winners
The Empath

New Orleans—my home from the start. I fit better on streets that sag, where live oaks lay low, where rain falls in sheets all afternoon

Hal-9000, Bach, and the Personal Physics of Going Deaf

There is no sound in space. Beyond our noisy atmosphere stretches an infinite quiet.

Our Psychedelic Minibreak 

I am Googling the best places to get magic mushrooms. It’s important to stress here that I am the squarest person who has ever lived.

Askew

It gets hold of me, I wrote less than a year after her death. Somehow  it creeps up.