Computers and Bill Clinton’s penis consume the world. Meanwhile, from behind a desk, my older sister becomes my teacher. She’s twenty-six. I’m fourteen.
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Tag: family
My Plea For Solitude by Harrison Kim
Right out of high school after Dad died I inherited eighteen acres down the road from Mom’s house. Raye, who I now call “The Old Crow” married me quick after that. I started building for our great future. I framed the house around and over top of the trailer, then took the inside trailer wall out. We trucked in water from Mom’s place. My friend Elton and I constructed the septic tank, a fifty gallon drum with pipe holes at both ends, pushed down in a rocky hole. My brother Jackson helped lift the roof trusses. My life pinnacle topped there, Raye and I bouncing on the bed by the wood stove, sex and drink and rock and roll in the custom made residence, and then came three kids, Raye and my mighty sperm created them two girls and a boy.
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The Sisterhood of Nod by Leila Allison
A Day in the Life of 1987
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Ever since it was installed in 1951, the carillon atop the Charleston city courthouse plays a piece of classical music after it chimes noon. On a day long since protected by the statute of limitations, I was waiting out a red light in front of the courthouse when the carillon played the Chopin nocturne featured in The Deer Hunter. Maybe I’ve reached the age where my cultural references are “out of print,” but there’s a special sadness in that melody which always sinks me; yet on that day, when I was twenty-eight, I felt nothing at all.
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Law and Order by Phebe Jewell
The day I find the box, Sam jumps the fence and I go looking for him. Dad calls Sam“A Repeat Offender,” but here we are, six months since Sam’s last escape and Dad still hasn’t fixed the fence.
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Sister Mother by Yash Seyedbagheri
One day, you look for money in your sister’s drawers and you discover something else completely. You started out the day Nick Botkin, sister of Nancy, son of Penelope. Now Penelope’s your grandmother and Nancy’s your mother.
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The Ceiling by Charlie Rogers
She said she saw angels, and repeated it, so I did too, but I still haven’t grasped what it means.
I climb onto my bed, above the covers, and I gaze at the ceiling, yearning to comprehend it. This gray and dirty ceiling has hovered my whole life, floating above my bed. Built before I arrived, still standing after I’ve gone. Untouched, unchanged. Can I imagine a life without its ever-presence?
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Bathroom Throne by Yashar Seyedbagheri
Dad locked my sister Nan and me in the bathroom when he had girlfriends over. This was always late at night, after his shift at Bavo’s Bar. He thought Mother would have taken us when she left. I was twelve and Nan fifteen.
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George and the Horse by Jazeen Hollings
Huddled in the dark, the three children shook at the sight of the black horse. It’s head, bashed in from madness, left a bloody smear along the splintered barn wall. It’s body was too still on the dusty floor. For Walter, the blond-haired boy of four, it was just a rigid, mountainous shadow. It frightened him to watch the beast, the devil and his illness finally take hold of the animal. The silence that followed that was unbearable, unclear. Walter felt that something was very wrong but his innocence would not allow him to understand the stillness of the mare. As his unease grew, consuming his little heart, he buried his head into his older sister’s arms for relief.
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Goodbye by Frederick K Foote
My doctor says, “Zeeb, my old friend, your remaining days can be numbered in weeks, and not more than four. Then your Black ass is out the door forevermore.”
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Last Word by Nathan S Jones
The last words she ever said.
I just wanted to know what they were. Call it a compulsion, a thought that nagged at me like a hot plate of my wife’s lasagna when I’d spent the day not eating.
My aunt had passed away. She was the last remnant of my father’s side of the family. My dad died of cancer at the age of 47 when I was eleven. My aunt had just died at the age of 86 (my dad would have been 85), and I really wanted to know the last thing she said.
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