“Goner,” by Beth Ann Fennelly
That Friday, after morning mass, the priests visited our third grade and announced a meeting for prospective altar boys. I went. Me, a girl. Why did I go? First, I was attracted to the theatrics: the costuming with the alb and the cincture, the stately procession down the aisle with the cross and the thurible (the censer filled with incense) that one of the altar boys (the thurifer) swung on its Jacob Marley chains. I...
“Twelve Parables,” by Diana Spechler
1. For seventh grade, you’ll attend The Newton Country Day School of the Sacred Heart. “All girls,” your mother says. “Won’t that be nice?” (Soon you’ll learn its alternate name: The Newton Cunty Fuck Pool of the Secret Lesbian.) “Aren’t we Jewish?” “What kind of question is that—are we Jewish.” “What is a sacred heart?” “I should know? That’s something you’ll ask the Catholics. The school’s on Dad’s way to work.” “So I’m going...
“Letter to my Sister in a Mental Hospital,” by Julia Laxer
Snow falls, building like thrush on the freeway. Black palate, no answers. A daddy calls you by name, but you hear soap opera in his voice, see the frazzled tangle of memory in crepe lines. Do you see past our eyes to something else? Answers I cannot ask, you can’t afford, anger. Snow falls. Snow falls, and I call to ask if you can go outside, if you can taste the cold too, taste it in numbers or letters or shivers?...
“What you Aren’t Allowed to Say,” by Kate Angus
That for years you did not come not once not ever unless you were sleeping; you woke up sometimes with the ocean filling a blue hollow at the crest of your legs–rolling whitecaps and seabirds above. That you were ashamed you were made of wet straw that wouldn’t cinder so you faked it with your lovers every time. That you believed admitting the truth would be like in the movies when someone says they’re scared of the basement and...
“Under Water,” by Holly Sneeringer
The morning after the lady next door dies in the middle of the night, I go inside my house to tell my mother. “Ronnie is dead,” I say to an empty foyer. I return to the front sidewalk where I had been standing, already warm on my summer bare feet. There is a stillness that I have never, ever felt before as I watch the silent blinking lights of the ambulance parked along the curb. Ronnie’s front door is pushed open by a firefighter...
“Lift,” by Bridgett Jensen
The grass is so green it’s damp, like it’s making water. Your toes, bare in flip-flops, are wet. Your son Carter talks 100 miles a minute as your feet keep time. The two of you are walking the pugs. When you came out the back door, Carter stood beneath the basketball hoop, tossing the ball up. He’s ten, and he follows a formula. So many shots up—so many baskets in. He does this every evening until he’s got it right. Tonight it went...
“The Locust: A Foundational Narrative,” by Ellen McGrath Smith
It lay there like a father who had worked a double-shift, not dead, but not ready to resume its upright role any time soon. When the graying locust fell from lightning, I learned that the directions and pulls of the earth operated independently of my location. The tree was on a hill behind our house; it was broken by electric teeth, nosed over by a dogged western wind, and even though the center of my drama was that it could have...
“Surfing,” by Flynn Berry
“He’s missing.” I am not sure why I said that. It is not even entirely true—he’s not missing in the way mountain climbers, or soldiers, or kidnap victims can be missing. He’s just out of contact. If we made enough phone calls, we might be able to find him. I look up from my plate. We are sitting outside at a restaurant in Bridgehampton. There are a few other tables of diners out of earshot, and a large tree above us. A warm maritime...
“Five Full Moons,” by Doris Ferleger
[excerpt] Daily I walk the woods alone, past the massive sycamore. Last night, a windstorm. Today the sycamore’s hundreds of silver limbs lie across the valley, reminding me of the tangled tresses of Queen Isis cut off to mourn the slain king, her beloved Osiris, who lay in a golden coffin hidden in the hollow of a tree trunk. A squirrel searches bewildered, for its stockpile of acorns stored inside the sycamore. It stands...
“Six Bright Horses and the Land of the Dead,” by Jen Silverman
[excerpt] When I first saw your picture, I was twenty years old. Winter 2005. I was coming off a Chicago street, smoky with December cold. Sheltering from the wind in the arch of the Smart Art Museum, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go in or not; then all of a sudden a sharp gust cut around the corner and sliced at my eyes, and I shouldered the door open and slipped into the startling heat of the lobby. From the moment I came upon...
“Constellations,” by Melita Schaum
1. A woman is asked to give a lecture on the essay as form. She strolls down to water. Sits on the shore, contemplating wrinkled surfaces, smooth depths. She thinks of design, pattern, rejects those easy figures. She wants to get at something deeper. Discontinuities. The ley lines of things that cannot exist without inference. She casts in her line; somewhere the subject waits to be caught. But it’s not the beadle who interrupts her...
“A Redhead Brunette and Blonde: My Muse was a Bird,” by Jennifer Ruden
The first one to quit writing had fiery red hair and a penchant for dark haired men (and women) who lacked formal education. Once, while we were in graduate school, we woke up in the same bed. “Now this doesn’t worry me,” she had said. “But he does.” She motioned to a young man crashed on the sofa: jeans around his ankles, tender white boxers dangerously close. “Do you know who that is?” I did not. The redhead wrote poems about...
“Learning to Talk,” by Patricia Henritze
Truth is for Sissies My father never uttered three honest words in a row. He lied like it was a gift, like it was his right, like there was no difference between truth and lies and it was petty and small minded to think otherwise. He taught me to parcel out truth in the smallest increments – grains of truth, layered between lies to confound the listener and make them doubt themselves. Or maybe I’m lying, because fathers...
“These Things Can I Love,” by Page Lambert
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”–Mary Oliver Listening to Zuzu Bollin’s sexy blues, sipping Johnnie Walker Red, courting loneliness. Loud music, bone-deep bass lyrics. Blood-pumping brass. The spine knows what to do, knows how to stretch the urge until it whines like catgut and fiddle, stretch the loneliness so thin it wraps like muscle around the angles of the skeleton. Body...
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Witness Nov 29, 2024
