Category: Nonfiction (Page 2 of 13)

Lying in Wait

1 August 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Jennifer Pinto

My dog, Josie, is barking at the kitchen window, warning me of an intruder. I look out into the front yard expecting to see deer or perhaps a wild turkey but if there is danger out there, I can’t see it. She continues jumping and pawing at the glass so I look outside again, this time glancing downward at the porch situated just below the window. It’s a snake. Its three foot long body is nestled and expertly blended into the wicker of my favorite chair but its head is levitating skyward, peeking into my kitchen window. I think about how many times I sat in that chair oblivious to this danger. This unexpected interloper upends the sense of tranquility and comfort I normally feel in my beautiful yard. I’m not sure I will ever be able to relax out there again.

It’s 2004 and we were sitting at the kitchen table having family dinner when my husband reached for the salt shaker and yelped in pain. He tried to dismiss it as nothing but I knew acknowledging any sort of discomfort was out of character for him so I insisted he make an appointment with the doctor right away. I suspected it might be something as simple as a pulled muscle or a gallstone but I was wrong. This sudden sharp pain in his right side led to a doctor’s visit then an ultrasound and finally a biopsy that confirmed my husband had cancer. Primary liver cancer. The surgeon discovered a baseball-sized mass on his otherwise pristine liver. There were no symptoms, no warning signs. It’s likely these cancer cells were hiding in his body for years until the mass grew large enough to cause pain. I was a young mom with children ages eight, five, and three. It felt like the life I had envisioned had suddenly been turned on its head.

I shoo the snake off the porch with a long handled broom and watch as it slithers into the landscaping and disappears. I spend days searching for holes and researching ways to deter snakes. I eventually return to my chair on the front porch but feel like I’m in a constant state of hypervigilance. One afternoon the mailman comes to my front door with a stack of letters in his hand. I can’t deliver your mail today he says as he pulls out his cell phone and shows me a picture of my mailbox. There is a long black snake slithering up the stones encasing the mailbox and blocking the door. It is the same snake I had seen on my porch and now I’m convinced its home is somewhere close to my own. It will be months before I walk down the wooded path to retrieve the mail without a large stick in my hand.

My husband had a liver resection to remove two thirds of his liver. The healthy portion was expected to regenerate. The pathologist reported that while it hadn’t spread outside of the liver, there was some vascular invasion which meant some cancer cells had escaped into his bloodstream and could be lying in wait to cause a recurrence in another part of his body. There was no way of knowing if the cancer would appear again. I learned how to hope for the best while being prepared for the worst. We signed our children up for “Walking the Dinosaur,” a children’s cancer support group to help them deal with their feelings. My husband coped by buying me a new set of garbage cans with wheels so I could easily bring the trash to the curb and by writing out passwords and instructions for me on how to pay the bills.

The snake is like a shadow that follows me around, a vague yet niggling thought in the back of my mind. So when the HVAC man who is servicing our air conditioning unit knocks on the door and says, Do you know there is a huge black snake in your yard? I just nod and say, I know. He is a burly guy with large tattooed biceps and a long goatee. I’m surprised when he admits the snake is making him jumpy. I am no longer afraid of the snake although I remain vigilant. While I hope I never see it again, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that encountering the snake is always a possibility.

After his liver resection, my husband was scanned every three months for several years. When the scans were eventually put on a yearly schedule, he started to feel confident enough in his health that he allowed me to buy him new shoes and new clothes again. He had refused any purchases until he could be certain he would live long enough to get good use out of them. It’s been twenty years since he was first diagnosed and he remains cancer-free.

Just last week, in our basement, we caught a baby snake in a glue trap meant for mice. I’m horrified that a snake could penetrate our walls and get so close. It prompts me to stay vigilant. I remind my husband he’s due for his next scan.

Jennifer Pinto writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. She has three grown children and lives in Cincinnati with her husband. She enjoys drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Her work has been published in The Citron Review, SunDog Lit, Lunch Ticket, The Bluebird Word and Muleskinner, among others.

Summer’s End

28 July 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Vicki Addesso

for Cathy

It’s now, this evening, and like this summer, I have grown older. Yes, summers grow old, and come to an end. On this last day of August, September’s eve, I sense autumn’s approach.

The mammoth sunflower growing all alone by the young maple tree in front of my house bobs its heavy head and sighs it seems to be getting dark earlier and earlier. It has never seen a summer before, does not know summer must end. Or that this is its last, its one and only. The bulbous center is bursting with fresh sunflower seeds, and come early morning I will watch the goldfinches come to pluck them out, and the bees indulge. The golden-yellow petals are many and flutter in the tiniest of breezes yet remain put. That stem, so thick and straight and tall, sways for the wind in storms and refuses to break. Before the flower at its top bloomed, I thought of Jack and his beanstalk. Could I climb the stem and find a giant in the clouds?

The lonely sunflower, from leftover seeds I dropped next to the baby tree after running out of room in the backyard gardens. Only this one of the dozen or so seeds casually tossed into the dirt grew. The backyard has many other sunflowers, autumn beauties and sunspots and Little Beckas that had bloomed a couple of weeks earlier. Some are still vibrant, others wilting. They will not wither in loneliness; they have one another. But that sunflower out in front of the house, it rips at my heart, knows nothing of its fate. Its single solitary life that will fade as this summer ends. Trees, shrubs, other plants and other creatures share a world in our front yard and have more, some many, summers ahead of them. No worries, sweet sunflower, I whisper through the window screen. After the crispness of fall, the cold of winter, the promise of spring, I will plant more seeds. Summer will return. There will be sunflowers again.

What is this evening for me? It’s crickets. Their sounds fill late summer nights. It is leaving the bedroom curtains open as the sky darkens. Sitting in my quiet room with no lamp lit, listening, watching the light leave. It’s letting the emotions of memories set butterflies to flutter in my belly and goosebumps to rise on my skin. Letting my mind wander and visions to appear. Suddenly I am a child again. Chasing fireflies. Air on so much of my skin, warm, the breeze soft. Swatting at the mosquito on my elbow, sweating, and not caring. Looking back at the house I grew up in, I see the porch light come on. Tilting my head back to glance at the sky, I get dizzy with the sensation of falling up instead of down. Then my mother’s voice calling me inside. I am young but I know it must end.

When did I realize, at what age, did I learn of endings? As a baby, did I notice that the cold of March — the month of my birth —began lifting? That the sun stayed longer, warming my face as my mother pushed me in a stroller? Then, the heat of summer. The slow creeping back of early sunsets. A chill in the air. My first winter. Was I two years old, three, or four when I knew things would come to an end?

When did Eve, that second of the first two human beings, realize that everything was changing? For the first time, one season flowed into another, and nothing was sure any longer. Already banished from the paradise of the Garden of Eden, she now witnessed the utter destruction of all that was familiar. Was she frightened? Or was she too busy to notice? Being mother to the entire human race certainly must have kept her busy.

So amusing how I, and others, even after years of watching our star come and go, shift in the sky, making us alter our clocks, still say, Wow, it’s getting dark so early now, as if it’s something new. As if we were children. As if it were the first time. As if we were sunflowers.

And so, it will happen again, just as it has every year, all the years of my life — the end. These edges of the seasons are my favorite time. The end slides into a beginning. For the time being.

Now I sit, at my desk, the open window in front of me. It is dark outside. The screen of my computer bright. The crickets singing their song of summer’s old age, the sound of it so familiar. The sound of longing. Realization and acceptance. It is the song of ending, reverberating through space and time. It is falling upwards and flying away.

Originally published in The Bluebird Word in February 2024.

Vicki Addesso is co-author of the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You~A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). Publishing credits include: Gravel Magazine, Barren Magazine, The Writer, Sleet Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and more. She was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize.

Life and Love as Seen Through My Plum Tree

7 July 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Michele Tjin

The delicate popcorn balls of flowers have appeared again, the herald of a new season. The arrival seems earlier each year.

The plum tree was already a mature specimen when we moved into this house. That first July, one of the first things we did was to pick up the rotting fruit off the ground. I whispered to the tree and my pregnant belly that in a year or two, there would be small hands to help harvest the fruit.

How does this tree of the family Prunus salicina know when to emerge from winter and make slivers of leaves and dainty blooms?

How do I know when to kick off this curtain of chaos and confront hard issues, difficile confligit?

Other signs of life and hope in my backyard: tiny sparrows and hummingbirds dancing around the flowers of the plum tree; songbirds trilling. The harshness of winter is behind us.

Despite not watering and pruning this tree, not giving it any real love or attention, it continues to be dependable and prolific.

I look forward to the perfume of plums ripening in my kitchen. Nothing is as wonderful as biting into the amber flesh and allowing the clear juice to run down my chin.

After a few weeks of non-stop eating, I’m satiated. Yet others tell me they can’t get enough of this fruit.

Don’t you forget about me this year, a friend says.

If you want to come over and climb a ladder, help yourself, I answer.

If I climb a ladder to bridge the chasms, will it be worth it, or will I fall?

In the summer, this tree is weighed down so much by its fruit that it needs to be propped up with a stick, a visible reminder of how much goodness this tree gives.

I imagine the tree’s complex network of roots searching deep underground to find a source of life-giving water to nourish itself.

How do I nourish my spirit when it’s dry and withered?

Things this plum tree has witnessed: birthday cakes and birthday parties. A kiddie pool that lasted just an afternoon one summer. A bounce house that winter. Another bounce house the following winter. That time we dyed socks. My efforts at being a backyard gardener. Dinners outside. Ants. The neighbor’s cat. That stray rabbit. People who once came over frequently but no longer visit because of quarantine, new seasons of life, or small conflicts that festered and coalesced into something bigger, something that doesn’t have a name or shape anymore.

Or maybe it’s just a lost connection. I’m not sure anymore.

These blossoms are fleeting: in just a few weeks, they will be torn apart by the wind. Their fragile nature and impermanence have always struck me, like they’re a metaphor for something.

My hands and a pair of smaller ones will collect the plums in four months when the green small marbles deepen into crimson globes, and we’ll give much of our harvest away.

After the summer, after a period of cold and reset, this tree will bloom once more the following spring and offer me hope again. Where will I be in a year?

[Originally published in The Bluebird Word in March 2022.]

Michele Tjin is an emerging writer who writes others’ stories by day and her own by night. When she is not writing, she aspires to be a better backyard gardener.

Julia

28 June 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Pama Lee Bennett

I’m standing beside a gurney in the emergency room, a gurney on which my great-aunt, age 104, is lying. Some preliminary tests have been done. A doctor we haven’t seen before enters and stands opposite me across the gurney. He doesn’t address her but begins talking over her to me.

“She appears to have a kidney condition, but I’m not sure we can do much to help her at her age.”

I look down at her, and back to him.

“Doctor, I’d like you to do for her whatever you would do for me, or yourself, or your own mother.”

“Well, your aunt is very old. She is probably at the end of her life.”

I think to myself, wait for it, wait for it.

My aunt looks up at him sweetly and says, “Doctor, I would like to live. But if I die, it’s all right.”

The look on his face: priceless.

He mumbles that certain procedures might injure her delicate body, but he can order some medication. I say, “Ok, I can understand that, but let’s do what we can.”

He leaves the room.

He can’t know that she walked on her own and lived on her own until 100. That she loves to play Skip-Bo with family members every week. That she reads voraciously and still keeps in touch with former students from her days as a one-room school teacher. That she hushes me in conversation if Tiger Woods comes on the golf channel and she wants to watch him play.

I can’t know that nine months from now, she will die suddenly and quietly of natural causes one afternoon, just short of 105.

I can’t know that. But neither can the doctor.

Pama Lee Bennett is a retired speech-language pathologist living in Sioux City, IA. She has taught English at summer language camps in Poland and at a school there in 2019. Her work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Evening Street Review, The Bluebird Word, The Penwood Review, and others.

Photo by Vinandita Karina Nabilla on Unsplash

The Basket

20 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Bonnie Demerjian

has followed you everywhere, like a faithful dog, overfilled with things too useful to be filed where, perhaps, they’ll be forgotten, or thrown away to later regret. There are other things, fit for no category or home. Here is a slip of paper with the name of the plumber who’s not in the phone book. Who is anymore? The postal tracking slip for that package to your sister. You learned the hard way about keeping these. Raffle tickets bought in hope, expired, and baggage tags that traveled to La Paz one spring and Florence one fall. User’s manuals which will surely be consulted since everything breaks down sometime. There are vaccination records for cats and dogs long gone. You have their photos, but it’s so heartless to throw away these chronicles of their bodily care. Where else to keep her crayon drawing of a hummingbird once it’s migrated from the refrigerator door? At the bottom, a jumble of business cards for window glass, car repair, and a name tag on a string from your high school reunion. On it, a photo, you at seventeen to remind you of who you were. Are? Then, a penny, a bullet, and three keys to forgotten doors. It’s not big enough to contain a whole life, but what vessel could?

Bonnie Demerjian writes from her island home in Southeast Alaska in the Tongass National Forest on the land of the Lingit Aaní, a place that continually nourishes her writing. Her poetry has appeared in Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak, Pure Slush, and Blue Heron Review, among others. Read some of her earlier work on The Bluebird Word, to include her flash nonfiction essay Three Scenes in Sunlight.

Yokwe!

15 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Linda Petrucelli

I spot my friend Malia among a squadron of women wearing flowery muumuus, shooing flies off a table laden with breadfruit. She’s invited me to the groundbreaking for a Marshallese community center and my husband Gary and I have just arrived at their out-of-the-way patch of volcanic real estate. I had helped Malia find support to take over the property and I anticipate being welcomed as a VIP, Pacific Islander style.

When she sees me, she waves.

“Yokwe, Leenda!” She is small-boned, with hair to her waist, a Polynesian Munchkin.

Malia is part of an exodus from the Marshall Islands who have migrated to Hawaii, refugees of rising sea levels and the health impacts of US nuclear testing. “Yokwe, Malia!” I repeat, recognizing the greeting, but not exactly sure what it means. We meet under a popup canopy flying turquoise, white and orange balloons, the colors of the Marshallese flag.

Gary, who has accompanied me for moral support and chauffeur services, is quickly dispatched to the crowd of men setting up folding chairs. Then Malia shows me a bolt of cloth which she cradles like a baby.

“Put this on now.”

“Excuse me?” I take a step back.

“You put this on now.” She presents the folded fabric with two hands. “Marshallese dress. Beautiful.”

Even after twenty years, I’ve never felt comfortable wearing the flamboyant frocks of my adopted home. My standard dress code is a black tee and jeans. But there is no escaping my plight. To refuse this gift would be insulting, so I relinquish the last shred of my autonomy, step inside a makeshift lean-to where the bathroom is located, and lock the door behind me.

Wild panic surges and my tee sticks to my skin like damp carbon paper. I unfold the dress and hold it up against my body. The Mother Hubbard, hand-stitched in the vibrant colors of their flag, appears to be an XS, suitable for a woman my size twenty-five pounds ago.

I strip down to my sports bra and briefs, then poke my head into the neck opening, sans hook and eye, snap, or even a button, and pull down as hard as I can. The seam stretches a little and my skull pops through, turning my hair into a fright wig and scraping my prominent, non-Marshallese nose.

Right around this time, Gary has graduated from folding chairs and is now in charge of grilling the ribs which, for a vegetarian, is a challenge.

With the dress bunched around my neck, I bend over to locate the sleeves. I squeeze my limbs into the tight pathways, two freighters navigating the Suez Canal, and immediately cut off the blood supply to my arms. If I was reasonably assured that I could get my perspiring body out of the dress, I would have called it quits and returned the gift with profuse apologies. But the patriotic straitjacket leaves me no choice, and I begin tugging the fabric hipwards.

When I strain the cloth over my haole butt, the material is so taut, I have to cross one thigh over the other to inch it down. What should be a flowing shift, on me, has become a slightly obscene, skin-tight shroud. I look like a Beluga whale wearing teal and tangerine.

Gary, now concerned by my absence, texts me: They want me to sing with them. Where R U? But the message never arrives. No cell service.

When I finally emerge, I mince my way into the daylight, hoping I will be able to breathe soon. Applause greets me and a cadre of Marshallese women appear to salute the flag I’m wearing. Malia whispers, beautiful, and adorns my forehead with a cowrie shell head lei that, due to my cramped posture, drunkenly tilts toward my nose.

I wish I was able to get into the spirit of things and enjoy myself. But I nearly fell over when I posed for photographs shoveling ceremonial soil, the garment interfering with my balance. And then there was the problem of sitting down and attempting to consume any quantity of food or drink, especially liquids. I’m sorry not to have fully appreciated the Marshallese haunting, acapella voices, their massive hospitality and joy. But I find joviality difficult when I wear a tourniquet from the neck down.

I sit next to Malia under the shade of a monkeypod tree and lean against her shoulder. “Remind me what Yokwe means.”

“You are a rainbow.”

Later, as we’re about to drive home my husband tells me, “Hey—nice dress!” I lower my rear end onto the car seat, swing my hobbled legs inside, and reach for the seatbelt. A rip sounds from under my right armpit. He asks me, “Don’t you want to change first?”

Finally, Gary puts the key in the ignition and the motor roars to life. He looks over at me, grins, and says, “Yokwe!”

“Shut up and drive,” I tell him. “I’m so over the rainbow.”

Linda Petrucelli’s essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in Parhelion, Barren, and Permafrost, among others. She’s lived in Hawaii for the last twenty years. Read more at: https://lindapetrucelli.com

At the Dive Bar After Thanksgiving

7 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Olivia McGill

We were at a bar with my partner Sam’s friends. Cal showed up late in the night. I hadn’t seen him in a while but heard how things were going for him. His wife kicked him out for the sake of their seven-year-old daughter. He was crashing at his woodshop.

His dark hair was grown out and slicked back. He wore his normal outfit, basically an Ace Ventura getup with a Hawaiian shirt and teal pants. With his good looks, it used to seem quirky, almost cool. But now, the overall effect was nauseating. He was no longer parodying a slimeball. He was one. His shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, and his normally tan, toned skin looked clammy.

Of course, the presence in people’s eyes is different when they’re on drugs. Distant. Wandering. But it was more than that. His eyes looked wider, slyer, his eyebrows more arched. I wasn’t shaken, per se, but had that subtle feeling that his arrival was doing something to my brain, somewhere deep in the engine room, where I couldn’t quite reach it.

“I like your sweater,” he said as he pulled at someone’s sleeve. “I love your hair,” he told me, his too-close gaze hooking into me as I tried to smile and turn away at the same time.

I tracked his movements as he hovered around the bar, bouncing from one group to the next, his unwantedness not registering for him. He slunk into the booth behind ours, and I tried to carry on a conversation but felt his presence above my head. He spilled a stranger’s drink. Then he slowly climbed over the booth wall, pried Sam and me apart, and sat in between us, his intense eye contact ping-ponging back and forth.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Sam asked. Cal had a new girlfriend who looked like his wife but who was annoying. “She’s in Mass…,” Cal said wistfully, reminding me of my father. The self-pitying tone of the addict during the holidays. Just a few days before, my dad sent me a text asking, “what u doin for thanksgiving.” I knew it meant all his buddies were with their families.

I wanted to ask Cal about his daughter but didn’t, unsure of what it might trigger in him. I didn’t know how often he saw her. And anyway, it was clear that he was not identifying as a father at that moment. It was like I was watching a different angle of my dad’s life, the one where he parties and doesn’t think about his children. I was in the role of the friend instead of the daughter. It wasn’t happening to me. It was happening to another little girl. I thought of who the friends might have been. The ones who thought of me as they watched my dad stumble and wander.

I’ve been through a lot of therapy. Sam told me a while back that Cal’s wife is in AlAnon. That’s the one where you know an alcoholic or addict. I’m in the one for people who were raised by them. I wonder if their little girl will end up in the same program, working to undo all the damage being inflicted on her despite the efforts of the single mother.

The funny thing about having an addict for a father is you don’t usually have a clear picture of what you missed out on. And when you see it, fathers in white collars coming home at the same time every day, taking their girls on outings, talking with them lucidly, you think it’s “icky.” It’s “too tender.”

And then. After you’ve accepted what happened to you and grieved what you missed out on. After you’ve learned to stop expecting anything from him. After you’ve found your own source of stability, joy, and love and have seen a glimpse of who you are despite him. After all that, you end up at a bar and a friend shows up and it’s him. It’s your father, twenty-five years ago, woodshop and all. Just switch out the Hawaiian shirt for a cowboy hat.

And part of you can’t help but think, “Stop everything. We can’t let this happen again. There must be something we can do.” But everyone just shakes their heads and exchanges looks. And the daughter remains unmentioned. And you keep thinking, “Something should come of this.” And nothing does.

Olivia McGill is from Hell’s Kitchen and lives in Brooklyn. She writes for a consulting firm and volunteers with Showing Up for Racial Justice. You can read her work in Danse Macabre, Ant vs. Whale, and The Adult Children of Alcoholics blog. She is working on a book-length memoir.

Next Lives

23 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Lillian Anderson

We arrange to meet up at this kitschy hole-in-the-wall tiki bar off Victory Boulevard. I haven’t seen Ben in over a decade, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing him instantly. The contours of his face have changed subtly, more angular perhaps. But then again, so have mine. He’s an apparition from my youth, back when I wore roll-on body glitter and scanned the radio for existential meaning. My middle-aged self is austere by comparison, free of artificial fragrance and parabens and God.

We find a corner booth and discuss what makes this a tiki bar, settling on Polynesian appropriation. I look down at the menu, studying the list of tropical rum-based drinks as if there’d be a pop quiz on it later.

“Why the protective body language?” he asks over the music blaring from a corner speaker. I realize that I’m hugging myself. I drop my shoulders and release the tension that I carry in my pelvic floor, where my physiotherapist tells me women store their stress. I think of being in utero where my mother stored hers, and her mother before her and so on, like a Russian nesting doll.

“This is strange, isn’t it? Life feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book sometimes,” I say, only you can’t go back a chapter when you fall knee deep into quicksand. We could’ve made it in another life.

“It’s weird to be human,” he says, and not for the first time, as we order drinks. Over Mai Tais, he tells me how he scattered his father’s ashes off the coast of Hawaii, making swirling patterns in the ocean with them, even putting some under his tongue.

“Isn’t that carcinogenic?” I ask, somewhat aghast.

“Not in small amounts,” he says evenly, as if consuming our loved ones was entirely natural. I nod in agreement, an ash-eating convert.

I confess that I’m agnostic, but my son believes in reincarnation. “He wants to be a butterfly in his next life,” I say, the way some mothers brag about their kid wanting to be a doctor. “Maybe we all come back as butterflies. Makes as much sense as anything else.” I imagine us resurrected as two delicate insects with paper-thin wings.

I swallow down the last of my drink to temper my nerves, ice clinking against the glass. Ben calls me a primordial attraction, and I balk at this disclosure, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He remembers me at sixteen with thick wild hair in a green shift dress. It was purple though, wasn’t it? An iridescent mauve the color of twilight. That’s the thing with memories, they’re malleable like wet clay.

We leave the bar after running out of things to say, our eyes adjusting to the punishing late afternoon sun. Ben reaches for my hand and our fingers interlock as he walks me to my car.

“I always liked your hands,” I say, turning them over to admire them.

“They can’t look the same as they did 20 years ago,” he says.

But they do, I think. We’ve time traveled.

I close my eyes, and I’m a teenager again, sitting on a beach towel in Santa Monica with Ben stretched out beside me, lying prone in the sand wearing red swim trunks. The summer neon sun is reflecting on the waves like shards of shattered glass.

“Walk on my back,” he says.

I let out a nervous laugh. “What? NO!”

“You’re all of what, ninety pounds? Come on, you won’t break me.”

I adjust my bikini and step gingerly onto his lower back, my heart racing. I can feel the topography of his back beneath my bare sandy feet, his skin slipping over muscle and sinew and bone.

I open my eyes to find two grown strangers standing in their place. I steady myself for another goodbye, but no one says it properly anymore. Instead, it’s a truncated bye or see you later or take care, as if people were made of porcelain (aren’t we?). I think of my dead brother and father, whom I never said goodbye to, wondering if I’d eat their ashes too to keep a part of them. Letting go of the living feels riskier, like walking away from a boiling kettle as it sings. Some endings are like that.

Lillian Anderson is an emerging creative nonfiction writer from Los Angeles. Publications include Scary Mommy and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

Busting Out of My Buster Browns

17 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Diana Raab

My mother blamed her ugly feet, laden with bunions and hammer toes, on her pointy shoes worn in the 1940s and 1950s. So, the day I took my very first step she began to obsess about the type of shoes I wore. I vividly remember the day in the 1950s, when she sat me in the back seat of her white Valiant and drove me to the local Buster Brown store in Fresh Meadows, New York. In my little frilly dress, she lifted me onto the platform, six stairs up, to have my feet measured. I remember the measurements to be quite time-consuming and scientific, and consisted of taking numerous measurements of different angles of my feet. The shoe salesman, dressed in a suit and tie, fitted my laced shoes and then ran a mobile x-ray machine over them to make sure my toes lay flat. Looking back I realize the seriousness and professionalism of his job.

From that day onwards and whenever I needed a new pair of shoes, particularly the week before the beginning of school, mother drove me back to the Buster Brown shoe store for a fitting. At school, I was the only girl not permitted to wear slip-on shoes. The week before my sixth grade prom, which I was to attend with Eric, the cutest blonde boy in the grade, I told my mother I wanted my first pair of slip-ons. Against what she called her better judgment, she agreed, but I was permitted to only wear them on that day. Even though I appreciate my mother’s gallant efforts, from that day on, I decided never again to wear laced shoes, except for sports, and became obsessed with slip-ons.

Perhaps because of this childhood trauma, as a young woman, I became obsessed with shoes of every color and style. At twenty-three, I got married and my husband called me Amelda Marcos, who was the First Lady of the Philippines and owned over three thousand pairs of shoes. When we took trips, my suitcase had more shoes than clothes!

Today, we all know that bunions and hammer toes are more related to a family history than to the type of shoes worn, although shoes can exacerbate a preexisting problem. Now in my late sixties, I have to thank my mother’s side of the family for my deformed toes and the bones growing in all different directions. I made the decision a long time ago not to become obsessed with wearing the right shoes. I wanted only beautiful shoes, because it did not matter; genetics would eventually doom me. A few years ago, when we moved into a new house, we had to build extra shelves in my closet, to accommodate every style and color shoe. Thanks, mom, for turning your obsession into my deep passion for shoes.

Diana Raab, MFA, PhD, is a memoirist, poet, workshop leader, thought-leader and award-winning author of fourteen books. She frequently writes on writing for healing and transformation. Her newest book is Hummingbird: Messages from My Ancestors, a memoir with reflection and writing prompts (Modern History Press, 2024). Visit her at https://dianaraab.com/.

Reminiscence

8 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

My mother’s fingernails are perfectly painted a deep shade of red. She sits upright in her maroon leather recliner, a soft white pillow on her lap. Sunlight filters in through the sliding glass doors near the kitchen in her Southern California home. Outside are roses, geraniums, begonias. A small, green-grass lawn. I sit beside my mother. It’s lunchtime. Today, her caregiver has made a pretty plate of Wheat Thin crackers, each topped with cottage cheese and a dab of ruby-red strawberry jam in the center.

With her left hand, my mother holds her plate on top of the pillow. She uses her right hand to daintily pinch her thumb and forefinger on the edges of a cracker. Slowly, so slowly and carefully, she lifts the cracker to her mouth. She chews her cracker thoroughly before reaching for another. Her movements are measured, as she savors each bite.

When lunch is over, my mother naps and I chat quietly with my two sisters who are also visiting. The day is tranquil, as we reminisce about our childhoods. My mother, who isn’t really sleeping, occasionally throws her thoughts into the conversation making us laugh. Two days later, I fly back home to Northern California.

Although my mother had been suffering from heart failure, I didn’t know those moments would be our ending. I didn’t know how vividly memories of that scene would evoke my mother’s essence. Even now, four years later, when I miss her and need her familiarity, I picture her brightly painted fingernails; her unhurried manner; her humor. Her gracefulness throughout her physical decline and her strength in confronting mortality.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer living in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, KYSO Flash, Raven’s Perch, Wordrunner eChapbooks, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Snow After Fire, was released in 2023 by Legacy Book Press. Learn about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.