Nonfiction
by Nikki Schulak.
“My mother wanted to see a whale before she died. In a boat off Montauk, Long Island, we puked over the side railings for the entire four-hour tour. No whales.”
by Dwaine Rieves.
“‘A really great deal on batteries, you hear?’ my father yells to me, his voice full of its old energy and a half-chewed biscuit. We’re eating breakfast, his attention on the television, mine on a newspaper photograph that captured President Obama at the groundbreaking of a new factory in Michigan, a battery manufacturing plant, as it happens.”
by Kelly Flanigan.
“I walk into Scott’s kitchen, sweaty from basketball and needing something cold to drink, and there’s his mom in just her underwear…”
by Kurt Magsamen.
“Cadavers don’t look much like anatomy drawings. They don’t smell much like anatomy books. The drawings are clean, ordered, the striations of muscle cells combed out tight and smooth, like the strings of a harp…”
by Margaret Brosnahan.
“A dozen dead ponies hung from the ceiling, strung up by chains at each end, their ragged bodies in nose-to-tail formation like a ghoulish merry-go-round…”
by Judy Rowley.
“Almost every night throughout my childhood I prayed that a miracle would occur, that I would be able to hear perfectly one day.”
by Robin Fast.
“Beneath this rag-and-bone sky, the only shadow cast is memory. It was wintertime thirty-five years ago when I learned that family afflictions, like weather, come at you from beyond.”
by Natalie Pearson.
“I make amends with small gifts—a loaf of crusty bread, a Louie Prima CD, lilacs in a mason jar. This little drive to nowhere would be just such a gift.”
by Kate Broad.
“My family must have read some theory, or made it up themselves, that having a pet could help lower suicide risk. An animal was something to believe in, to hold close—a reason to get up each day.”