In basic training, there were guys who got there and then decided they didn’t want to be soldiers. They didn’t like the Army or the fighting they foresaw in their uncertain futures. They didn’t like Fort Sill itself, or the bombs falling in the far parts of the base that rattled the floors of our small shoes, and they certainly didn’t like the spit-shined drill sergeants with their demanding demeanor, their curses and catchphrases. Some guys missed their girlfriends. Some guys missed their mommas or their boys back home. Whatever the reason, they wanted out, so they faked injuries. One guy said he had a bad back. One guy claimed he tore his ACL. Another had sprained his big toe, and that kept him from training. Most of them dropped the act once they realized they wouldn’t be allowed to leave, but a few of them continued the charade. They thought by faking an injury they would get to go home, but the military doesn’t let its men out that easily. We called them “broke dick,” because in the masculine world of the military, a man is defined by his dick and the work he does. A man who can’t perform is a broke dick. For weeks the broke dicks did details: they mowed the grass around the barracks and picked up trash. They worked in the kitchens or had to clean outhouses in the field. During morning PT they monitored street crossings, and during chow they served mashed potatoes before washing all the pots and pans. Every day they got stuck doing shitty details instead of training with the rest of us, and every night we’d talk about the broke dicks. We’d get in from twelve hours on the rifle range and someone would say the broke dicks had been on bullet duty that day. While we were at the gas chamber the broke dicks were scrubbing shit pots at training sites. While we were digging foxholes in the Oklahoma dirt, they were peeling potatoes in the steam-clanking kitchen. But we knew the broke dicks were there by their own design, so we didn’t have much sympathy for them, young as we were. The rest of us had signed up to be soldiers, not peel fucking potatoes. We were awake before reveille and still up hours after retreat. We didn’t sleep with our rifles but we cleaned them constantly, and by week three we were lean, mean, fighting machines, attuned to bullets and bombs, as the best soldiers were. The broke dicks weren’t soldiers. They didn’t want to be soldiers. They didn’t want to fight against our enemies, foreign or domestic. We called them broke dick when we passed them picking up trash on the side of the road. Broke dick when we sat beside them in the chow hall and broke dick when we saw them gathering for roadside detail under the hot Oklahoma sun. We called them broke dick all damn day. Broke dick in the morning and broke dick at night, which reminds me once again how your fellow men can make you believe anything, if they’re scared enough. For example, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait just weeks before we graduated basic and the buildup to Desert Storm began, we were still saying the ones who didn’t want to fight were the broken ones. * * * **Paul Crenshaw** is the author of three essay collections: _This One Will Hurt You_ ; _This We’ll Defend_ ; and _Melt with Me_ , on the Cold War culture of the 1980s. Other work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Pushcart Prize anthologies. Follow him on Substack at @paulcrenstorm, where this essay first appeared. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🪖 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🗯️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🤕 designed by Anna Hall; and 💥 delivered to our 3,448 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Oct 8, 2025 “Kitchen Rat” by Nancy McCabe | A small reckoning. Oct 9, 2024 “Aftermath” by Elane Johnson | The details you remember. Oct 11, 2023 “Of Phones” by Jill Talbot | Cords & connections. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

You haven’t read the book in forty years, and now, your three-year-old son, nestled in between his mother and you, waits for the story. His emergence into the world allows you visitation to your own childhood, remembering the boy you were in the mirror of your son’s daily life. When he talks to the bees, you remember talking to the bees. When he sings and dances to his favorite band, BTS, you remember singing and dancing to your favorite musician, Michael Jackson. In him, a repeated pattern of experience. How easy it is to be swept away by the world of the book. How easy it is to forget who you are now—a writer and father and husband—and become that boy you once were, feeling what that boy felt when he first read the book, the first book he read himself. You remember that boy and his loneliness. His shyness made him quick to cower into corners like a scared dog during a thunderstorm. Like you, your son is easily moved by words, is quick to still when a story is being told. He doesn’t disrupt your reading, leaning his head on your shoulder, his breath tickling your ear, listening with full attention. At the end of a chapter, you ask if you should stop. “Go on, go on,” he says, though his voice is tired with sleep. So you read and read and read. Until he tells you he can’t keep his eyes open and he burrows his face into your chest and you immediately feel his breathing change, the soft whoosh of his open-mouth snore. The next night you pick up where you left off. When Charlotte dies, the boy you once were appears again. He’s there. Wet-eyed. The lump in his throat grows, hard and woody, like an avocado seed. You cough to break it down. Your son stiffens against you. He clutches your arm hard. Barely breathing. “What happened?” he says. You remember how you reread the passage a few times in disbelief, thinking you must have read wrong because you weren’t a good reader yet. But you didn’t read it wrong then, and you don’t read it wrong now. “She can’t be,” your son says. “She’s just faking.” And then the quiet that follows. In that quiet, a storm. As a boy, you cried that night. Quietly, so you wouldn’t wake your parents. This was your first complicated cry. It was not a cry of a scraped knee or the disappointment of not getting the teddy bear you wanted. This was a cry that was for someone beyond yourself—a talking spider, a loyal friend—a cry that recognized the fragility of the world and that everything has a beginning and an end and, you hoped, another beginning. You didn’t have the language for this yet, but you felt it, felt it in the streams trickling down the chub of your cheeks, the distortion of lamplight that filled your childhood room, the sink in the chair’s cushions as if you were about to plummet down a hole. The boy next to you now, your son, doesn’t cry. He remains still, his warmth pressed into your arm. “Are you OK?” you say. “I’m OK,” he says. “Do you want me to keep reading?” “Keep reading, Daddy.” “Are you sure?” “This isn’t where things end,” he says. It isn’t. He’s right. He usually is. Your son is not you. He loves the book as you did, but he loves it in his own way. He is becoming his own person. The sadness that followed the boy you were is not the sadness that will follow him, though sadness follows everyone. You _do_ see your childhood in him, see it in the black luster of his hair, in the smile your wife says is your smile. Yet, your boy is not making you relive your childhood. He is making you reimagine it, recreate it, and within this new space, another world opens. When you finish the book, your son says, “That was a good book, Daddy.” “It was, wasn’t it.” He nods. “What’s next?” * * * **Ira Sukrungruang** is the author of the memoir _This Jade World_ and the forthcoming essay collection _Under and Up: Fatherhood and Fear in the Age of Distrust_. He teaches creative writing at Kenyon College. You can find more information about his work at buddhistboy.com and on his Instagram, @sukrungruang. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 📖 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🐖 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🕷️ designed by Anna Hall; and 🕸️ delivered to our 3,356 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Oct 1, 2025 “I Want a Do-Over” by Helen Collins Sitler | The limits of change. Oct 2, 2024 “The Chicken Is Maligned” by Luke Reiter | The rooster struts by. Oct 4, 2023 “This Washcloth” by Sarah Kilch Gaffney | Finding meaning in the mundane. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

At Little Long Pond, loons paddle and preen, roll and flap. My teen daughter and I scan the water for mother and baby, our daily seek-and-find game. In July, baby is black and fluffy, tucked into the plumage of mother’s back. In August, baby is brown and elongated, gliding at the tip of mother’s tail feathers. Some days, mother’s beak tremors in staccato warbling. Others, her bellowing wail haunts the entire pond, echoing off the granite shore, so weighted by longing it could be her final attempt to connect with something beyond this realm. Today, she’s a black torpedo between the water’s surface and pond floor grasses. Sleek, wings tucked tight, she bullets toward a catch while baby waits above. But just before she breaks the surface to serve the silver fish, baby dives below. When mother rises, her neck jerks side to side. Fearful red eyes dart. Omniscient on the shore, we say, “Don’t fret! He’s practicing! He’ll come up!” “Just like the zoo,” I say, knowing my daughter can’t forget the day we were separated when she was four. What I don’t say is how, as I torpedoed past the animal exhibits, past kids casually holding mothers’ hands—none of them mine, none of them mine—I wailed across eternity that I had already buried one baby and could not survive losing another. How I begged like a child. _Don’t. Please. Take anything else. Anything._ Baby loon pops up. We breathe again. For this moment, the universe is loving and perfect. Mother slips the glinting fish into baby’s beak. * * * **Erin Wood** ’s work can be found in _The Sun_ , _Brevity_ , and _HuffPost Personal_ , and has been named Notable in The Best American Essays series. She is author of _Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives_ and editor of _Scars: An Anthology_. Erin is working on an essay collection, for which she received grant support as a Mid-America Arts Alliance 2025 Catalyze Fellow. She owns and runs Et Alia Press in Little Rock. Find her at erinwood.com and etaliapress.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🐦🐤 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🐦 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 👀 designed by Anna Hall; and 😮‍💨 delivered to our 3,056 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Sep 24, 2025 “In Grover Cleveland’s Childhood Home” by Sari Fordham | We’ll be us, but more fascinating. Sep 25, 2024 “Nothing to Fix” by Krista Puttler | A non-emergency. Sep 27, 2023 “How to Learn a Language” by Brian Benson | You’re never too old. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

About five years ago, when I was in my mid-fifties, I found I needed to grapple with some words that were not part of my everyday vocabulary. Whenever a new word arrived, I sought comfort by making associations. When a friend said, _It’s all about the chemistry_ , for instance, thinking about the chemistry in my kitchen and how separate ingredients combined can become lemon cake or apple strudel was easier than thinking about the chemistry in my son’s brain. When the pediatrician said, _The brain is like a big ball of yarn_ , I imagined a cat by a fireplace, a grandmother knitting in a rocking chair, a ball of yarn on her cozy lap. When the doctor described how ADHD needs to be teased from depression and anxiety in order to figure out what’s going on, I latched on to _teased_ and thought of boys and skating rinks and movie theaters, anything more appealing than the string of letters that labeled our gentle blue-eyed boy. I broke words apart and then thought of other words in order to feel less pain. _Schizo_ became _split_ became _pea_ became _soup_ became _warmth_ became _snow_ became the time our family walked around a lake in Bled, Slovenia, and stopped at an outdoor café and our little boys had cups of hot chocolate piled with whipped cream and our older boy walked down to the lake to skip stones across its surface. _Phrenia_ became _mind_ became _philosophy_ became my son reading Marcus Aurelius and Aristotle and his passion for Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor and all its sad minor notes, the soundtrack of our home during the pandemic, and remembering how I would stand still and close my eyes whenever I heard his instrument. _Psychotic_ wasn’t unfamiliar because it’s a word I’d throw around. _She’s fucking psychotic._ _Psychosis_ , however, is altogether different, a more serious word. I had to stare at the definition for a long time before I could understand that one, if I ever did. Maybe I finally understood psychosis when I saw it in the face of my son. Or maybe it’s clearer to say, I didn’t see my son in his face, and that’s when I understood it. _Lithium_ was another word I had to look up. I leaned into images of where it’s extracted, rock and brine, and waded up to my knees in the saltwater of my mind in the northwest, sauntered over smooth boulders, alone among the driftwood and the lapping waves. And when my son received his new diagnosis, I separated _bi_ from _polar_. There’s bi-sexual, and I get it. There’s polar opposite. There are two poles. There’s the North Pole and Christmas and presents and my boys figuring out one year that I was Santa and how we kept up the game long after they’d caught on. There’s game and gaming and wasting time and getting stoned and dirty dishes and takeout containers on the floor of his bedroom and alone and only and memories and someone telling me it doesn’t matter how he spends his time because he only has one job right now, only one job in the world that ​​​​matters. I remember watching his slender form by the water before all those words got in the way. He showed me how, when you skip stones, you have to angle your body just so; you must throw with intention, or those stones won’t fly. And I thought of how words can be like rocks in your heart, so I gathered together the weight of those words and lugged them to the lake near our home and practiced tossing them one after another until only a few words remained that I could hold, like _His only job is to love himself_. It’s easy to love him. Loving yourself is harder, but I can help him with that. Plus, there’s nothing I need to google in _His only job is to love himself_. I understand every single one of those words. * * * **Regina Landor** is a three-time alum of The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her essays have appeared in _Salon_ , _The Brevity Blog_ , _The Black Fork Review_ , _The Foreign Service Journal_ , _The Rappahannock Review_ , _Heimat Review_ , _Common Ground Review_ , and elsewhere. Her husband was a diplomat with USAID for seventeen years, and they raised their two sons in the US, Serbia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. She writes the Substack This Traveling Life, and lives in Evanston, Illinois. More at reginalandor.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🍰🧠🧶 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🫛🍲❄️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🏞️🪨🎁 designed by Anna Hall; and ❤️❤️❤️ delivered to our 3,025 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Sep 17, 2025 “Touchstones” by Mimi Schwartz | What the living carry. Sep 18, 2024 “JFK” by Jesse Lee Kercheval | Sibling rivalry. Sep 20, 2023 “Bones” by Heather Osterman-Davis | Stuck in the middle, together. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Mama worried most about water moccasins. And sure enough, a cottonmouth camouflaged in muddy water’ll kill a kid quick as a hiccup. We learned that before we learned our letters, growing up in Alabama. But the woods we played in were home to more than one kind of pit viper. It puzzled me then that copperheads didn’t keep her up at night, and I still don’t understand, if I’m honest. Water moccasins kept to the creek, while other snakes, under cover of abandoned outdoor toys and faithfully tended gardens, slithered right up to the house. But I reckon if you raise your children in a landscape full of serpents, you decide where to draw the line with your worries. So, we never ran out the kitchen door without the ritual call and response: she’d shout at our backs, “Stay outta the creek!” We’d holler the chorus, “Yes, ma’am!” The week of my seventh birthday, Little Paul’s daddy, Big Paul, killed a snake in the creek. He did it where the water ran through our yard, though. Not theirs. Righteous anger gripped my throat and drove my own fingernails into my defenseless palms. After he’d done it, he’d forced her slack mouth open with a stick and left her there like a grim monument in the shallow water. Her black skin shone polished-stone-smooth and peculiar, resting on the creek bed. I didn’t want to see in her mouth, but it was bright white, clear down her throat, like a light that drew the eye. That was the point of the stick, after all. Cottonmouth. Big Paul wanted us to see. It’s how Alabama children learn. By afternoon, every kid in the neighborhood had come to gawk and jeer. It was only an hour after he’d left her there that Little Paul brought the mob. He was the oldest and biggest, and too much like his daddy. He led the march carrying a long, straight stick of his own. When they got down the hill and gathered on the red clay bank, he stabbed through the creek’s surface, aiming for her, but the mud was soft and she yielded, gently bumping away from the point of his weapon. Frustrated, and fueled by the crowd he’d brought with him, Little Paul used the stick instead to hook her and pull her out of the creek. The boys laughed and cheered while her body dangled, then it slid off the stick and the water mercifully took her back. Little Paul noticed me then, which never worked in my favor. Noticed I wasn’t laughing. I was standing too much apart. In a neighborhood brimming with kids, I was younger than the next youngest by two years, and by some statistical injustice, the only girl. When our eyes met, I bit the inside of my cheek and stared through his eyes to the back of his head. “What’sa matter, little girl?” he hissed. “You feelin’ sorry for that snake?” Little Paul walked closer, and I turned myself to stone, like maybe the snake had done when Big Paul’s boots towered over her. Eyes fixed, teeth grinding harder into my soft cheek, salt and metal seeping into my mouth. The other boys were busy throwing rocks at the snake, so it was just us two. Little Paul so close now his chest nearly touched my chin. His sweaty heat registered even through the summer afternoon, deepening the red of my sunburned cheeks. He raked the stick, wet from the creek and the snake, across my face. “Tenderheart,” he sneered, and turned away. The other boys followed him up the hill, finally left me alone with her. I stayed on the bank for hours and days. I listened for shrieks from the front yard; magnolia pods landing like hand grenades and a certain sort of shouting meant the boys were busy playing war. Only then was it safe to sing to her. Church songs mostly, since that’s what I knew. I could lay honeysuckles on the surface of the water, too, as long as no one saw me do it. They’d float downstream without raising suspicion. She never floated downstream, though. Not like the flowers anyway. She rested on the bottom, where the water barely moved. Her obsidian shine slipped away by the hour. Her skin grew ghostly and rose in a kind of cloud until I couldn’t see her in it anymore. Until she became the creek itself. * * * **Joanna Byrd** is an emerging writer who was born and raised in Alabama. Her life’s work so far includes operating a center for artists with developmental disabilities, serving as program officer at a charitable foundation, and running the morning shift at a 7-Eleven on Route 66 in Albuquerque. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her wife, nearly grown children, and ever-changing cast of cats and dogs and foster kittens. This essay first appeared in Buckman Journal #13 (2024). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🏡 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🌳🌳🌳 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🐍 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🎶 delivered to our 3,015 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Sep 10, 2025 “Rhythm” by Isaac Yuen | Beyond thought. Sep 11, 2024 “Kindness and Sorrow” by Laurie Easter | Making contact. Sep 13, 2023 “‘I Had This in My Office & Thought You Should Have a Photo of the God Mobile’” by B. J. Hollars | Lessons from a writing teacher. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

he waves whenever I walk by. He lives four blocks away, and he lets the neighbor dogs poop in his yard. He lets mine. That says all you need to know about him, or all I need to know. To say it’s okay for an animal to crap on your lawn is to say we all have needs and can’t always manage the timing, is to say sometimes it’s best to start with forgiveness, as Jimmy always does, is to say that to allow something to happen as it’s meant to is easier than trying to stop it. Jimmy’s mother paid her bills last week. That’s what Jimmy tells me after I put on my funeral home sweater set and black slacks and drive to work and stand in the lobby across from him just after he’s arrived for his mother’s visitation. It’s the most I’ve ever talked to him. It’s the most I can do right now. His mother paid her bills all on her own, he says, and she had just seen the cardiologist a few days ago and her blood pressure couldn’t be better, her heart beat the right number of times and thumped correctly, which is to say Jimmy was caught off guard when his mother slipped from the bed. He called 911 and the ambulance roared her to the hospital. She didn’t last long. Jimmy stands there, his hands fiddling the air as he tells me his story, which most people want to do, of the one he loved and how he lost her, how he didn’t see it coming. Do any of us see what is coming? The windows of this lobby are wide and tall, taking in the whole of the parking lot and the streets and that intersection—a four-way stop—that you must go through to get here. This, the place of stop and go. This, the place of goodbye. This, the place where Jimmy tells me the story that will become his most important story yet while all the light pours in, as do the coming hours and days, unwilling to halt, unwilling to be managed by anyone, unwilling to do anything but ask our forgiveness for what they take from us, for what they leave behind. * * * **Shuly Xóchitl Cawood** runs writing workshops, doodles with watercolors and metallic pencils, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is the author of six books, including _What the Fortune Teller Would Have Said_ (winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Competition) and _The Going and Goodbye_ (a memoir in essays). Her forthcoming title is _I Am Trying to Love the World_ (Press 53, 2027). Learn more about Shuly at shulycawood.com. This essay first appeared in Brevity #81 (2026). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🏘️ edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🐕 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🩺 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🪟delivered to our 3,000 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Aug 27, 2025 “The Night I Ended My Pregnancy” by Julie Parker | Three trips to Walgreens. Aug 28, 2024 “The Landlord, the Tenant, and the Machete” by Beth Kephart | It was a fine arrangement. Aug 30, 2023 “Anna Maria Island (I)” by Brian Turner | Seeking immortality in the surf. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

For weeks, my husband and I drive around with two stainless steel bowls and a pair of scissors in the back of our car. Finally, I spot a burst of gold in a weedy patch a few miles from our house. “You think there’s enough?” My husband, Fausto, asks, voice catching in excitement. We unclip our seat belts and open our doors. Nodding, I reach into the trunk and pick up the supplies. The late summer heat slides down our backs, making our shirts cling to our shoulders. We jog across the road and wade into the grass so I can collect what I need. Last month, I took a class where I learned how to make natural dyes. I stood in a room next to other worn-out women, most of whom, like me, had recently left teaching. We learned how to forage for materials and then spent hours simmering pots of sumac berries, goldenrod, and willow bark in an attempt to bring color back into our lives. The weeds are thicker than we expected, some as high as my thigh. “Be careful of the bugs,” Fausto says. A clutch of gnats swarms around his face. As he brushes them away, I reach the goldenrod patch. But as I bring my scissors to the stems, I second-guess myself. During our class, the instructor warned us that people sometimes confuse goldenrod with ragweed when they forage. “It’s easy to mistake one for the other, but only goldenrod will make yellow,” she explained as we huddled around her bundle of flowers. When she plunged the goldenrod into the warm water, its many petals yielded a sunny hue. “This is what you need, right?” Fausto asks in a cautious voice—the same question he asked in early spring when I realized I was burned out and wanted to quit. I’d said yes then so easily. I was certain my exhaustion would evaporate as soon as I emailed my boss. The sun is starting to make everything hazy. Turning, I look up at Fausto’s face. He smiles, and his crow’s feet bloom. Hidden in those folds is all the stress he carries for me. My lingering burnout. The recent death of a friend. I bring one of my gloved hands up to his face. “Yes, this is what I need.” I assure him, quietly. Then I turn and quickly cut the plant. Fausto nods and holds out the bowls so I can fill them. I need a few hundred grams to make a dye pot, but I didn’t think to bring a scale, so we guess the weight with our fingers. Once we’ve gathered what we need, we swim our way out of the weeds and drive back home. I heave a stainless steel pot onto our stove and, with some trepidation, watch the flowers sink into the water. For a moment, they rest at the bottom, sodden. And then, suddenly, all their brightness unfurls. * * * **Emily Hall** ’s prose has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as _Passages North_ , _Blood Orange Review_ , _Cherry Tree_ , _Does It Have Pockets_ , _Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine_ , and _100 Word Story_. She’s a prose editor for _Pictura Journal_ and has a PhD in contemporary Anglophone fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and two mischievous pets. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was ☀️ edited by Hattie Fletcher; 👀 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; ✂️ designed by Anna Hall; and 💛delivered to our 2,998 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Aug 20, 2025 “Seesaw” by Danielle Huggins | Up. Down. Up. Down. Aug 21, 2024 “Distance” by Jill Talbot | How to get going and stay gone. Aug 23, 2023 “notes from the underground” by Melissa Matthewson | Start with the word. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Everything was shiny in Aunt Jeanne and Uncle Jimmy’s apartment on Sutton Place​: the large mirrors, the silver teapot, the tall windows. ​Over the sofa, there was a large painting of Aunt Jeanne in a low-cut white dress. The scent of roses filled the air. My sister and I wore striped lavender and white dresses, white anklet socks, and black patent leather shoes. We had dressed up for the occasion. We perched on the edge of our small armchairs. My father tapped his hand on the arm of his chair. My mother twisted her bracelet back and forth on her wrist. “This is Robin. She is ten,” my father said, introducing me to these relatives we rarely saw. I felt as if I should curtsy, but I just smiled. “And this is Wendy, she is seven,” my mother said. Framed by the window, m​y sister looked like a**** delicate __ doll, her thick blonde hair tied back with a ribbon, her green eyes flashing. She held a sugar cookie in her hand but didn’t take a bite. I didn’t take a cookie, preferring to keep my throat clear.​ ​​​I needed to speak my part when the time came. ​​​ I was supposed to tell Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Jeanne about my schoolwork, my dance and piano lessons. I had been prepped to paint a rosy picture of our family life on a tree-lined street in Queens where city buses rattled along, chrome glinting. This was not a simple visit; it was more like an audition. Would we pass muster? Would Uncle Jimmy give my father the money we needed? At ten, I felt sure it all depended on me​, though I can see now that was hardly ​​fair.​ I did not know that Uncle Jimmy, the eldest of a family of eleven children, had made his fortune importing Herend porcelain from Hungary and selling the hand-crafted animal figures to collectors in the States. I did not understand how my father, the tenth child, twenty years younger than Jimmy, had struggled to find his own place in his family and in the world. I knew only that I was prepared to speak to my uncle. My father and Uncle Jimmy were deep in conversation. My mother and Aunt Jeanne __ chatted softly. As the grown-ups talked, my eyes scanned the scene. Small statues of cats, rabbits​,​ and birds stood on tables. In this room of plush carpets and hushed voices, how would I speak? A square of sunlight glowed on the rug. I wanted to fade into that patch of light but I knew that much depended on me. The clock chimed two times. My mother smiled and nodded. I cleared my throat and prepared to speak. I did not say, “Mom and Dad fight a lot and she wants a divorce.” I did not say, “We have an old car that breaks down a lot.” I did not say, “I know that you are rich and we are not.” I said, “I take piano lessons and modern dance. I like to read and write. I’m a very good student.” My mother had told me to say those things, and I performed admirably. I loved acting in plays and having an audience. Uncle Jimmy stared at the painting over the fireplace, coughed slightly, and said, “Lovely, lovely.” He might have been speaking about me or about Aunt Jeanne’s portrait. I couldn’t tell. “Take a cookie, dear,” he said, but I did not. Aunt Jeanne said, “You are a talented girl, Robin. When you turn fifteen, I will take you to France, to Bretagne, to the fishing village where I grew up. You will love it there.” My heart soared. A trip to France, how marvelous! I looked around to see what the others thought of this invitation. My sister crossed and uncrossed her ankles, my father stared at the mauve carpet, and my mother gazed out the window​ as if she wished she could escape​. After a few minutes, my father said, “We should be going.” My sister stood and scooped up a small cat statue. She rubbed it gently and held it up to the light. My mother, her face pale, said, “Give me the kitty, Wendy. It’s not a toy—it’s for decoration.” Panic rose in my chest. What if my sister broke the cat and ruined everything? ​I had worked so hard to say my piece. ​But she gave it to my mother. We all moved toward the door as if we had rehearsed our exit. Uncle Jimmy said, “Your daughters are charming. I will be in touch.” We said goodbye. There were no hugs or embraces. We waited for the elevator in silence. In the​ dark​ lobby, the doorman, in a crisp blue uniform, held the door and ushered us out. When we emerged from the building, the harsh sun stung my eyes. “In five years, I’m going to France with Aunt Jeanne,” I told my mother _._ “We’ll see about that,” she said. “You were very grown-up today.” She gave my hand a squeeze. I shaded my eyes with my other hand and saw Wendy strolling with my father half a block ahead of us. “They could have given us a little animal as a present,” I said. “Those figures are very expensive,” said my mother. “They are not toys for children.” My head swirled with thoughts of money, ​brothers, ​and​ trips to​ France—so many things I did not yet understand. Brothers would not always remain friends. Money matters caused sharp rifts in families. As for France, I would travel there on my own years later, when I was twenty-five, but only to Paris, not to Aunt Jeanne’s village in Bretagne. I pulled away from my mother and ran ahead to my father.__ “Daddy, wait,” I called. He turned to me and smiled. * * * **Robin Mayer Stein** has published fiction and poetry in _50 Give or Take_ , _The Paterson Literary Review_ , _Persimmon Tree_ , _The Haikuist_ , and _Fiddlehead Folio_. She received a poetry grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was twice a winner of Haiku Newton. She leads memoir and poetry workshops and offers school programs about her book, _My Two Cities: A Story of Immigration and Inspiration_. She loves swimming, Scrabble, and hydrangeas. You can reach Robin at robinsteincreative.com or on Facebook. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🪟 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🎀 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🍪 designed by Anna Hall; and ☀️ delivered to our 3,011 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Aug 13, 2025 “What Are You?” by Sammi LaBue | Eight and three-quarters. Aug 14, 2024 “My First Rebellion” by Nancy Huggett | Start small. Aug 16, 2023 “Happy Birthday” by Nicholas Dighiera | Marking the breathless passage of time. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

This summer I dated a girl who liked fungi. I dated a girl who was allergic to alliums. A girl who was allergic to chocolate. A girl who liked drinking chai. This summer I dated a girl who worked for the government. A girl who worked with electricity. A girl whose work required her to sign an NDA. I dated a girl who liked to go on food tours of major cities. A girl who liked to make art with moss. A girl who liked to drink wine, a girl who liked a skinny margarita, a girl who could only have Polish potato vodka. I had to go to a specialty store to make her a drink. I dated a girl who watched Marvel movies, a girl who preferred _Star Trek_ , a girl who liked British murder mysteries curled up in bed. A girl who played basketball, a girl who played hockey, a girl with a bruised foot, a girl recovering from surgery. A girl who always needed to reschedule, a girl who needed regularly scheduled introvert time, a girl who drove to see me in a rainstorm. This summer I dated an atheist. I dated a girl who went to church every week. A girl whose church was the gym. I dated a girl who took her teen to protests and a girl who asked what the protests were about. All of these girls had once been married to men; that was the only thing they had in common, other than their interest in me. A girl who liked to make spreadsheets, a girl who asked me what I liked, a girl who didn’t. We went out for coffee, for dinner. We picked blueberries. We went to the bookstore. We painted pottery at a studio. We made crafts on her apartment floor. We texted in the morning and before bed, on the app and on my phone. Sent each other pictures and silly emojis. I liked one girl best: the one I wasn’t really dating. * * * **Robin Silbergleid** is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently _In the Cubiculum Nocturnum_ (Dancing Girl Press). With collaborators from The Art of Infertility, she is coeditor of _Infertilities, A Curation_ (Wayne State UP, 2023). Her book _Queer Mother Memoir: Experiments in Life/Narrative_ is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2026. Born and raised in the Midwest, she currently lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she is professor of English at Michigan State University. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🍄🍫🍷 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🫖📄🎨 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🎥 🏀🏒 designed by Anna Hall; and 🫐📚🙃 delivered to our 3,006 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Aug 6, 2025 “Racing Rachael Ray” by Brendan O’Meara | Beef Stroganoff in thirty minutes. Aug 7, 2024 “In the Dark” by Katherine Frankowski | I was reading about these fish. Aug 09, 2023 “Badge” by Wendy Fontaine | Selling cookies safely. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

My mother stands in the Entebbe airport, a daughter on each side. It is January 1978, and Idi Amin has been up to his usual brutality. He has murdered four college professors, scores of Christians in the southeast, and fifteen high-ranking officials, and these are just the killings reported in _The_ _New York Times_. Since he has taken power, Idi Amin has killed one hundred thousand Ugandans, or three hundred thousand. Human rights observers aren’t sure. My mother gently squeezes our hands and tells my sister Sonja and me to “stop staring, for goodness’ sake,” and then she whispers, “You’ve seen people before, haven’t you?” There are more soldiers in the airport than civilians, and in truth, she has never seen anything like this. What are the chances that he is here, too? We’re in this airport because my Finnish grandmother is dying. My mother received the telegram in Kenya: _Come immediately._ She and my father considered their options. We had fled Uganda several months earlier, leaving our possessions in storage, but once in Kenya, we didn’t have money for one ticket, let alone three. Somehow, the plan developed: Our family would return to Uganda, sell enough of our belongings to buy tickets to Finland, and then three of us would fly out and my father would take a bus back to Nairobi. When my father’s boss forbade him from entering Uganda, my mother laughed. “So now it’s too dangerous.” She laughed and laughed, and then she cried. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll go alone.” What she meant is that she would go without her husband. Of course, she would take us. We were her limbs. Our father, ever pragmatic, nodded. On the black market in Kampala, my mother sold her wedding gifts. “Never mind,” she said. She moved like a fury and didn’t allow herself to cry for her dying mother. _Aiti-aiti-aiti_ ,__ she thought. Mama-mama-mama. She took the shillings, good only in Uganda, to the Sabena Airline office and booked the earliest flight out. Now, at the Entebbe airport, we sit at our gate. My mother opens her purse for us, and Sonja and I pin brooches to our T-shirts and smear strawberry ChapStick across our lips. A soldier approaches. “Excuse me, madam. How are you, madam?” My mother takes out her Finnish passport, her eyes wild. She assumes Americans are in trouble again and her daughters will be detained. Maybe her citizenship can protect us. The soldier looks embarrassed. He tells her to put her passport away. “Idi Amin would like to welcome you to Uganda,” he says. We are in the departure lounge. “Would you like to meet him?” “We’d be honored,” my mother says. There is no other possible answer. She takes a fast brush to our hair and holds out her hands. As we walk through the airport, people turn away, actively minding their own affairs. Idi Amin is a large man dressed in khaki and exuding so much charm that he seems to fill the VIP lounge. A few other _mzungu_ are already here, all of them women and children. One of the bodyguards gestures for us to stand in a row, and Amin stops chatting and walks down the line. A man takes photographs. We are political theater. The pictures will show that Uganda is safe. _Look at these foreign women bringing their babies here. See how happy they are to meet the president._ When Idi Amin reaches us, he shakes my mother’s hand and says, “You are welcome.” It’s the most Ugandan of greetings. My mother smiles and says thank you. When Idi Amin reaches for Sonja’s hand, she holds out her left arm. My mother has heard something about a cameraman killed over a left-handed shake. She hisses, “your other hand.” Sonja drops her arm and snorts back tears. Idi Amin laughs. He’s like a jolly uncle. He bends at the waist and takes Sonja’s left hand in his. “Look at this one,” he says. “You are welcome, little sister.” When we meet Idi Amin, he is kind and our mother is mean. This is one story. Here’s another: After we shake hands with Idi Amin, we board a plane to Finland and our mother says goodbye to her mother. At the graveside, she stands between us, holding our hands. The sky is gray with unfallen snow. We have not yet become acclimatized to winter or to our mother’s grief. She smiles down at us. “Move your fingers if they’re cold.” Years later, our mother will die too young and will reside solely in the land of our memories. Some days, unexpected days, I will wake to the image of her sweeping through the Entebbe airport, holding our hands. Across the span of time, she will call to her daughters and she will tell us that we must always do what we have to do. Never mind the rest. * * * **Sari Fordham** is a writer, professor, and environmental activist. Her memoir, _Wait for God to Notice_ , narrates her childhood in Uganda. Her work has appeared in _The New York Times_ , _Passages North_ , _Brevity_ , The Best of the Net series, and _Booth_ , among others. She is the author of a free monthly newsletter, _Cool It: Simple Steps to Save the Planet_. This essay first appeared in _Passages North_ (Nov 2017). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🇺🇬 🛫 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 👩‍👧‍👧 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🫳🫲 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🛬🇫🇮 delivered to our 3,006 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jul 30, 2025 “How I See an Owl, Alive in the Face of Things” by Naomi Cohn | Fake it till you make it. Jul 31, 2024 “Postpartum Madness” by Judy Bolton-Fasman | The baby is real; everything else is up for grabs. Aug 02, 2023 “Broken Macarons” by Amy Suardi | The sweetness of imperfection. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

They say that once you learn to meditate, everything you do becomes an act of meditation. The same is true for writing, I think. I wake up writing. Scoop the litter, start the laundry, brew a cup, check to see if my broken heart is scabbing over. Breathe a grateful breath for having gone eighteen days without cigarettes. Check Italian Tinder. Wake my computer and work up a website to make wealthy California realtors even wealthier. Check Substack. Read dazzling bits of math and science, laugh at a grocery store anecdote. Decide not to think about cigarettes. Decide not to imagine my ex’s new girl and how skinny she must be. Hang laundry on the outside lines, run four miles along the Sàvena River, shower, read a few chapters of DeLillo, wondering at the splendid turns of phrase and detesting the absolute boredom of rich people. Yell at my teenagers for the dirty kitchen. Schedule revenge sex on Tinder. Throw away the Chesterfield Blues I shouldn’t have bought on my run. Lie to my teenagers when they ask if I bought cigarettes on my run. Explain to my teenagers why gorgeous people are rarely good in bed. Export realtor designs. Call my ex’s father, whom I love with my whole broken heart, to see if he’s eating and if the scans of his new lung nodules are back. Haul my pack, heavy with hard-cover books, to a café and take my usual table by the door. Unfold my iPad. Close it again. Read Chabon, wondering at the splendid turns of phrase and the optimism—love even—undergirding a three-page description of a dirty kitchen. Stir blonde sugar into a decaffeinated Americano. Explain to nearby Italians how Trump is more Mussolini than Berlusconi. Bum a cigarette. On my phone, watch a video of dildos thumping the windows of an ICE truck. On the café television, watch American bombs detonate. Apologize to Italians for my gluttonous goblin of a country. Open my iPad. Stare at nothing. Ponder the gluttonous goblins who run cults and corporations and countries. Write ten words, check Italian Tinder, send a flirtatious message with questionable grammar. Write a thousand words, a new story starting to coagulate, about the folks who struggle. The stubborn ones. The brave ones. The ones who can’t back down, can’t shut up, can’t breathe. Leave Xs in place of names I’ll invent later, just crunching the sentences, getting down loosely and sinuously the story that has been gaining mass all day and all this year and since the breakup and since the birth of my children and the death and resurrection of my faith, and since the time I stumbled across a mug shot of my brother online, all the way back to the day my father spanked my mother with an army boot, a story that was always in the works and is now finally arriving with its mundane grit and inevitable surprises, reminding me, as my stories usually do, that cults and fiefdoms and empires don’t endure. That in the end, they always eat themselves. * * * **Daniela Meyer** is a graphic designer and cofounder of a tech company who lives in Bologna, Italy. Her work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been published by _The Republic of Letters_ , _The Pett Review_ , Indignor House, and Bad Clown Books. Both her short stories and novels explore working class characters, unexpected connection, and power struggle. She holds a bachelor’s in fine arts, is a lifelong songwriter, and once illustrated a picture book about a young girl’s cheese addiction, which was in no way autobiographical. More at dmclemens.substack.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 💭 edited by Hattie Fletcher; ☕ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 💻 designed by Anna Hall; and ❌ delivered to our 3,006 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jul 23, 2025 “Geraniums” by Laura Rink | The roots of red. Jul 24, 2024 “Your Wife Knows You Are Here” by Helene Kiser | Visiting hours. Jul 26, 2023 “The Process Server” by Jared Hanks | An unforgettable early morning delivery. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Years before they built the bridge that connected skinny Dauphin Island to the mainland, my grandmother made her way across the Mississippi Sound by boat. She glimpsed Mobile Bay, felt the bounce of waves and tasted air salty with de Soto and charred Confederate forts. Her own great-grandfather had been a Union man. Ahead lay the island, an impressive fourteen-mile sediment deposition rising from the Gulf of Mexico. There, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse, grades one through six, and the community provided her a modest residence. Whether she could hear the evening tides retreat or advance is lost to history, but the progression of my family remains. Most long-time islanders never completed more than six years of education. They fished year-round and in the summer shucked oysters for extra money—occupations that required mere stubbornness to make a living from the sea. So it was with my grandfather, who I’m told fell for my grandmother’s easy smile and accomplishments. No one remembers the exact date or season when he first appeared outside the schoolhouse at day’s end, but he waited there for weeks, maybe months, and offered to walk her home. She didn’t think much of the scrawny half-Greek with dark, slicked hair and mischievous eyes. Nor did she like his drinking and card playing, activities he was purported to do on occasion. She rebuffed him yet he waited. Smitten, the story goes. Why she traveled across three states, chose the island and then my grandfather, I will never know. Did he play his guitar, serenade her? Maybe she was called by the sea. Maybe an island was an easy place to forget the past. Maybe the oil fields of her native Texas drove her to a place unencumbered by boom and bust. She once told me she’d believed she would never marry, was not attractive, but she loved to teach and could lose herself in books. Although she would travel no greater distance than her journey to Dauphin Island, her mind would travel for a lifetime. This I know. I also know she chose the island and my grandfather. She chose him despite his lack of a high school education and his stench of fish. His smile, guitar, work ethic likely played a role, but who can say for certain? The deepest places do not add up. Before the island had a bridge, she made choices. An island remains an island only so long as it is without a solid crossing. My mother and I forded the path she made, sandy and watery though it was, still is, and strewn with washed-up shells, oyster beds, and a past we can never know. * * * **Ramona Reeves** is a writer living in Texas. Her collection of short fiction, _It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories_ , won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her most recent fiction and nonfiction have appeared in _South 85 Journal_ , _Post Road_ , _Bridge Eight Literary Magazine_ , and _The Adroit Journal_. An excerpt from her novel is forthcoming in _Huizache_ in the fall. Find her on Instagram @ramona.reeves.writes or at ramonareeves.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🚣 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🏫 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🏝️ designed by Anna Hall; and 📍 delivered to our 2,987 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jul 16, 2025 “Invitation” by Charlotte Maya | Saying yes. Jul 17, 2024 “Boot Cut” by Zachary Ostraff | Finding the right fit. Jul 19, 2023 “The Essay Determines How It Will Begin” by Suzanne Roberts | Pay attention. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

The stacks of them on the floor in front of my bookcases were so high I couldn’t reach the books on the bottom shelves—beautiful quarterlies, some with the photograph of a young or great old poet on their covers. A few I published poems in (in days when journals were the only way to go). Many almost new, from 2019, 2020, 2021. As if it were a paper boat, I have tried to keep the literary world afloat. From most I had read only a few poems, taking a new arrival to the bathroom and flipping through to see how far behind my taste lags, folding down the pages of a few poets I know and a few I’ve never heard of, promising myself to return to them. But so many journals had hardly been touched or were untouched, still in cellophane. And in the living room, no more books could be added to tables and footstools for color, to be part of the décor. Suddenly, two huge grocery sacks from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, packed so heavy I could hardly lift them. ~~~ The university library won’t take them, and the local library and its branches don’t have space. The used bookstore only buys used books. Then, shopping at the upscale stores on Walnut Street (Williams Sonoma, Banana Republic), I notice a wrought iron garbage container perfectly painted a dark and prosperous green. What if I prop one bag against it, like a forgotten treasure, and see how it goes? And, if no one takes it, the garbage men will pick it up and I’ll never know. ~~~ Later, when I come out of the Apple store, I notice a woman bent over the bag, balancing it on the side of the garbage can. So she knows it’s not a bag of precious clothes and a Rolex. She knows it’s something for a reader, someone who recognizes the gift and will go through and claim one or two books for herself. She may feel excited, like someone called up to the stage during _The Price Is Right_. It seems like it’s happening as I planned, perfectly, and so, the next day, I bring the second bag and leave it in the same place. ~~~ Today, I get an email from my speaking agent, who says a lady in Pittsburgh emailed her that she found two bags of literary journals with my name and address on them and wants to know if I want them returned to me. * * * **Toi Derricotte** ’s sixth collection of poetry, _“I”: New and Selected Poems_ , was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award. Since 2020, she has been the recipient of the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Pegasus Award from the Poetry Foundation, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. With Cornelius Eady, she cofounded Cave Canem, a home for the many voices of African American poetry, in 1996. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 📚📚 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🚫🙅 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 📚🗑️ designed by Anna Hall; and 📩 delivered to our 2,886 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jul 9, 2025 “Une Femme” by Shala Erlich | Body language. Jul 10, 2024 “Later” by Kate Lewis | You’ll be there in a minute. Jul 12, 2023 “Am I the Burning House?” by Ona Gritz | Reconsidering what it means to be brave. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

July 4, 1976. Our town parade, where everything waves—beauty queens and politicians sprouting from convertibles washed and dried in the street with soft rags the night before, Betsy Ross flags nodding off porches. Firemen’s kids pelt non-firemen’s kids with hard candy, and sirens moan, only nobody’s hurt. Everyone still smokes. And later, in the simmering summer dark, just before the fireworks are set to go off, my mother jams her thumb in the slamming screen door then weeps over the bathroom sink. Perhaps the water pouring over her thumb feels like the only kindness in her life that night, with three shaggy kids, a pissy husband, and not enough money, never enough money, jobs coming and going. Perhaps she’s thinking, _I didn’t sign up for this_. I’m five, and I’ve cried—when my mother punished me for pocketing a pack of Dentyne in the Bradlees, after I dropped my milkshake, every time Billy convinces our parents to snap the hall light off. That’s when my bed is soaked in shadow, and all the shapes I can name in the daylight—doll–dresser–picture book—dissolve into mute strangeness, bleak and unrecognizable, these unreliable objects, refusing familiarity. Some tears are real; some, ginned up. But it’s July 4th, I’m five, and my mother is the kind of person who tangles with Stop & Shop cashiers when they overcharge for paper plates, who can draw us to her soft hips with a single _don’t-push-me_ holler launched from five backyards away. How has she forgotten herself here at the sink, neglected to remember who she is in the order of things? Also, does the house smell like hot dogs? Do sparkler sticks lie spent and black on the front steps, do fireflies begin their blinking as bats cut low over the brook? Perhaps my hair smells like chlorine from the community pool, and I’m connecting the dots between mosquito bites starring my shins. I’ll bet you this: We make contact. Billy pinches me, Michael flicks a towel at Billy’s ass, hunts him down for a wedgie. I’m telling you, I forget so much. But I remember what moms do. What dads do. Clean. Complain. Earn money. Stay together. And I remember that jammed thumb. The center will not hold, not when it’s sodden with tears. Water smooths, weakens; salt corrodes. And she’s everything—my mom, not my dad—alpha, omega, amen. I know the truth, my instinct slashes right through his black belt in karate, the stories about fishing and hunting and, later, dodging a stray bullet in North Philly, to find her, the core, the tiniest nesting doll and the one I’m counting on to straighten up, dry off, and make the whole world spin. Even now, on this star-spangled night, before I can ride a two-wheeler or lace up my own sneakers, I know everything was better before I was born. She was blonde and thin, but I made her dark—loosened her belly, leached gold from her hair, kept her home, even if she was the first person in her family to graduate college. I observe and do the math: Motherhood = forced subtraction. She and her sore thumb are at a loss, stationed in the wrong bathroom, the kids’ bathroom, not the blue bathroom where on Saturday nights she leans against the vanity, pressing her lips to spread Revlon’s _Cherries in the Snow_ across the field of her mouth, the bathroom where I perch on the toilet seat with the frosted blue bottle of Avon’s Rapture cologne, the scent with the stopper that resembles a tulip, or a flame, sinuous. _Rapture_ —not a word I can use in a sentence, but a word whose implications I understand (lady, high heels, leaving the house), seven suggestive letters unfurling in gold script across the curvy torso of the bottle. The blue bottle sits in the blue bathroom in the blue house where everything happens: the new kitten pukes in that corner, the tall mother cries in this one—not for the first time in her life, but the first time in mine, so the first time that matters. The world is small as she spins it, and on July 4, 1976, the world is this stout blue house, four bedrooms, five people inside, and I am five. And a jammed finger, one that didn’t even break, didn’t even leave a scar, mothered by a stream of cool water, sparks everything tonight. * * * **Laurie Granieri** ’s work has appeared in _Image_ , _Hippocampus Magazine_ , the _On Being_ blog, _Under the Gum Tree_ , and _River Teeth_ ’s _Beautiful Things_ series. Her essay “Leaving the Body” won _Nelle_ ’s 2023 Three Sisters Award for nonfiction. She recently completed a creative nonfiction writing residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). You can find her at lauriegranieri.com/writing. This essay first appeared at _Lunch Ticket_ (2017). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🎉🇺🇸 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🧑‍🚒🍬 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 👍💥 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 😢💧 delivered to our 2,859 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jul 2, 2025 “Hot Chips” by Michael Copperman | Land of the Hot Cheeto, Home of the Brave. Jul 3, 2024 “Courtship” by Mark Hendrickson | Asking permission. Jul 5, 2023 “How to Build Resentments (List of Parts)” by Dorian Fox | Taking stock. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

I log in to the same message every Thursday at four: Recurring Meeting for Matilde Bolton—Hebrew Senior Life—Three East Berenson. It’s as if my mother stars in a local cable television show. I wait for the host to let us in; the host is the social worker whom my mother can’t stand. On a full week, there are eight of us—three middle-aged children and one son-in-law, along with four grandchildren—suspended in space, waiting to enter. And then, as if a wand has been waved, we suddenly appear on the screen. We’re an oddball crew of cheerleaders for my mother, who does not want to be cheered up or placated. She wants to be sprung from the awful food and her fellow residents who, she complains, drool and smell. “No me gustan viejos,” she says in her native Spanish. She doesn’t like old people. She doesn’t like Zoom much either. It disorients her. Are we real, or has she imagined us crowding on-screen for this bizarre recording? The word _zoom_ in this context is new to my mother. In another iteration, it implied quickness, the smooth glide of going somewhere fast—things she can no longer do. Including my mother, we inhabit seven squares. At the beginning of each Zoom session, my mother asks who we are. This is the time of day for sundowning—she loses track of the world, loses track of her mind. Her mind goes away with the sun, confusing day and night. The grandchildren call her Abu, short for Abuela—a moniker my daughter invented as a toddler when she could not pronounce Abuela. “Abu, you’re silly,” they’ll playfully say to her. The comment makes my mother either giggly or furious. When she laughs now, her voice is as scratched up as the old vinyl records of Cuban dance music we used to listen to. That same voice is as frightening as it ever was when she’s angry. We try mightily to engage my mother on these calls by asking her what she had for lunch. My mother scrunches up her face and says the same thing each time: “Porquería! Basura!” Junk! Garbage! If it’s a bad week, she’ll go on to stamp out her entire life with those same words. It was the same when I was a kid. Her life was mierda. My mother is agitated when everyone speaks at once or, worse yet, if we have side conversations. She’s sure that we’re talking about her or deliberately confusing her. “Sha, sha, sha,” she’ll scream when she’s had enough. “Secreticos, secreticos, secreticos!” __ She thinks that we’re telling little secrets about her, secreticos __ that are planted everywhere like mines. Her paranoia is a throwback to those years she pulled my hair and accused me of talking basura behind her back: “I can hear you wherever you are in the world.” Other weeks, my mother is visibly delighted to be on Zoom. Those are the times she sees her mother, my abuela, inhabiting a Zoom cubicle. “Look, there’s my mother,” she says, waving and smiling. Abuela has been dead for over forty years. Over text, my sister and I debate whether to tell my mother this hard, bedrock fact. “Is it dementia?” my sister asks. I type back that I think Mom spends too much time alone in her room. “It’s a by-product of the COVID-19 lockdown—a hallucination,” I write back. “Look at Abuela,” my mother says. “Mira, look, my mother is smiling and waving back at me. Hola, Mamá! Can you see her?” It does not surprise me that my grandmother is a presence on these visits. When my mother finally stopped walking almost ten years ago, she cried out that she was turning into Abuela. Abuela stopped walking when Abuelo died. It wasn’t grief that stranded her in a wheelchair; it was a sense of entitlement—she was ready for her daughters to take care of her. Instead, Abuela went to the Hebrew Home. She was barely seventy. My mother’s arrival at Hebrew Senior Life at eighty feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I’m going to die solita—alone—looking at the four walls of a nursing home like my mother.” My mother has been pronouncing this sentence on herself since I was a teenager. She said this after my father died. She said this when she had to depend on a walker. She said this when we found an independent-living situation for her. She bankrupted herself when she jettisoned her walker, using so many services that she was no longer considered the least bit independent. None of the neurologists I have taken her to have figured out why my mother stopped walking. Maybe this is another generational case of entitlement. She is Abuela’s daughter, after all. I’m the oldest of my mother’s three children, and I know it will fall to me to tell her that her mother is dead—the ultimate secretico unleashed, darkening my mother’s world like a solar eclipse. “I know she’s dead.” My mother is insulted that I am stating the obvious to her. “I’m not stupid.” Finally, after weeks of Abuela’s ghost Zoom-bombing us, it dawns on me—my mother is vigorously waving to herself. “Hola, Mamá _._ ” __ She blows kisses at her image—an image she doesn’t recognize. Her memory is blunted. She hasn’t recently seen herself in a mirror. “Wave again,” I tell my mother. When she does, I ask, “Is Abuela waving back?” “Claro _—_ of course!” I wait for a beat. “Mom, you are waving at your own image. That’s actually you in the Zoom square.” “Vaya pal carajo _._ I’m not so vieja _,_ ” __ she screams. I wait for another beat. The sun goes down. “Well then,” I say, “tell Abuela how much we love her.” * * * **Judy Bolton-Fasman** is the author of _Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets_. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines and major newspapers. A version of this essay first appeared in Catapult magazine (December 2020). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 💻 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🔲 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 💬 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 👋 delivered to our 2,841 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jun 25, 2025 “Bosom Buddies” by Deborah Sosin | Our bodies, ourselves. Jun 26, 2024 “Bright Green Box” by Hanna du Plessis | Rest and repeat. Jun 28, 2023 “Dick” by Gabe Montesanti | King for a day. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

The dog looked like he was smiling when he panted, but we were all worried about his heaving chest. He was old, and the vet said he had a heart murmur. We gave him cool water, but it was Candy who had brought the umbrella and thought to prop it alongside the dog so its pale shade lessened the heat on his fur. When the water and the umbrella weren’t enough, when the dog kept panting with his big mouth opened wide, Peet thought maybe we should make a swamp cooler. He had a towel in his car, and Tea had brought ice for the strawberries. It was a group effort, making the swamp cooler, and I didn’t contribute much but I did bring the dog and that counts for something. A different cemetery, some old place with wide canopies and gnarly roots, might have made for a better picnic. This cemetery had a tiny chapel in a field, and sure, there were trees, but only around the edge, and noon shadows are selfish, making no room for human or dog. For a few minutes I walked the dog next to the chapel so he could rest in the patch of shade hugging the walls, and that might have helped, but then some lady showed up and I worried she would get mad at me for having a dog in a cemetery. A Catholic one at that. I don’t know what the Bible says about dogs in cemeteries or if they even thought of that when they wrote it. Vincent’s brother is a Catholic priest and I could have asked him, but he doesn’t like dogs much so I’m sure his answer would have been _how dare you_. I had made the dog piss as soon as I got out of the car, on the little pull-off beside the road, but the lady didn’t know that I was doing my best to keep the dog from pissing on anyone’s grave. And maybe that’s rude, too, letting a dog piss on the pull-off that’s more or less the cemetery anyway. By the time I got back to the picnic, the food was all set up and the towel was frosty and cool. Peet squeezed out most of the water and the dog lay down, panting, and we put the towel over his back. It must have helped some. I had made focaccia, Vincent’s recipe, and I’m sure I didn’t put as much oil on as he did but it was good. Not as good as Vincent making it himself, how on any random afternoon he would say, “I feel like making focaccia.” But his favorite was always the next morning. He would drink his coffee and eat his crunchy focaccia and he always seemed so pleased with himself, that he was the type of person to just make focaccia when he felt like it. That is something I always loved about him, how if there was some little thing to make our lives better, he would just do it. Vincent wasn’t pagan but he wasn’t Catholic either and since he was dead I guess his opinion on both of those didn’t matter so much. Candy set up a little altar, and I put some photographs of Vincent on it: Vincent bent over with laughter in the kitchen, Vincent crawling across a log in a swamp, Vincent on the couch with two dogs licking his face. There was a part of the ritual where Candy lit candles and we could say whatever we wanted and he might hear us. In the moment I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, so I said that I had adopted his dog and the dog was doing pretty good. Sleeping on the bed and wallowing in ponds and everything. I like to think it mattered to have his dog there. That he would have been happy to know we brought his dog to see him on his birthday and that all of us tried to keep the dog cool and did an okay job of it. Maybe we should have waited till evening for the picnic, and maybe Vincent should have waited to shoot up till he had a buddy to keep an eye on him. We’re all doing our best out here with what we got, with ice water and an umbrella and a towel, trying to find the parts of us that hurt the most and throwing little parties over them. * * * **Blake HC Mihm** is an emerging writer who lives in southwestern Virginia with his two dogs. His work has been featured in _Lilac Peril_ , _Ouch! Collective_ , and _Dishsoap Quarterly_ , and is upcoming in _West Trade Review_. He was selected as one of the poets for DC Pride Poems 2024. You can read more of his writing at blakehc.wordpress.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🐕 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🧊 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🪦 designed by Anna Hall; and 🐶 delivered to our 2,815 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ****PS/**** We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. See the submission call → ### **From the archive** Jun 18, 2025 “The Interstate” by JR Fenn | Life moves fast. Jun 19, 2024 “Father’s Day” by Amie McGraham | Remembering the last weekend. Jun 21, 2023 “Strawberry Tongue” by Danielle Harms | Love in the time of strep throat. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * * We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. Guidelines →

In the front seat, the driver and her sister keep up a meaningless chat, trying not to overhear but hoping, yes, please, to overhear. In the back seat, their eighty-two-year-old mother cuddles and whispers with her new beau as dusk descends. They have all spent the day in Florida’s Everglades, where they kept a watchful eye on crocodiles lurking near the surface of the brackish wetlands. Now, steering through the softening twilight on the hour-long trip back to Boca Raton, the driver glances in the rearview mirror at her mother and the sweetheart, their gray heads touching. Widowed for six years, the mother is soon to marry again. She and her eighty-six-year-old fiancé know about the gossip swirling around them, the smirks hiding behind the well-wishes. Friends have issued blunt challenges to the woman, heedless of the hurt their words might cause. _You’re desecrating your dead husband’s memory._ _A lot of women wouldn’t marry an eighty-six-year-old man._ _Why not just keep it a friendship?_ But now, in the back seat, they talk about their happiness. And then one word rises above the murmurs. “Orgasm.” The sisters’ conversation skids to a stop, and they share a sideways glance. Their mother said that word. The driver keeps her eyes on the darkening highway ahead. She thinks about a Saturday morning when she was fourteen and helping her mother change the sheets. “What’s a French kiss?” she asked. By then the daughter had had her first kiss, a memorable meeting of lips but no more. Probably she had heard the term at school and had some inkling of its fun naughtiness. Now she was pushing, testing to see what her mother, who had told her nothing about the exquisite intimacy of bodies, might share. Her mother stroked the crease of the sheet, folding it just so over the top of the blanket. “You don’t need to know that,” she said. * * * **Sheri Venema** ’s nonfiction has appeared in _Pithead Chapel_ , _Emerge Literary Journal_ , _Coal Hill Review_ , _Art in the Time of Covid-19_ (San Fedele Press), and _Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids_ (Eerdmans Publishing). Her travel writing and feature stories have been published in _Baltimore Magazine_ and _The Washington Post_. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and a dog named Raven. Find her on Facebook at facebook.com/sheri.venema. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🚗👂edited by Hattie Fletcher; 👵💕👴 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 💬 👀 designed by Anna Hall; and 🛣️ 🌅 delivered to our 2,779 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ****PS/**** We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. See the submission call → ### **From the archive** Jun 11, 2025 “Twin A and Twin B” by Brad Snyder | Specks of hope. Jun 12, 2024 “The Blue Phone” by Ghazala Datoo O’Keefe | A private line. Jun 14, 2023 “When You Measured the World” by Robert Erle Barham | A father’s memories. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * * We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. Guidelines →

Read carefully. Act FAST or lose EVERYTHING. We have INFORMATION you need. If you want to see the next TEN YEARS, follow directions. This is not a joke. Begin IMMEDIATELY. Walk thirty minutes three times a week. WE WILL KNOW IF YOU DON’T. MUSCLES are not optional. Lift weights even if you don’t feel like it. You IGNORED us before. Now your HIPS hurt. The fatigue is a MESSAGE. THREE meals, no excuses. Protein, protein, protein. Fruits. Vegetables. NO CHEETOS. If you disobey, there will be stomach ACID. In bed by TEN, no SCREENS after nine, or we keep you AWAKE. Read books you LOVE and quit BORING ones. Say YES to adventures. Say NO to people who stress you. Ten minutes of meditation. Daily. You may work alone or in a group. _Too busy_ is not a valid excuse. We will know if you say _tomorrow_. That’s when we ratchet up the knee PAIN. We will keep you from picking up your grandson. Stairs will be IMPOSSIBLE. Delay and you won’t open a jar. You won’t GET UP off the floor. You will be TIRED. Your deadline is NOT negotiable. We warned you before, and now we NEED your attention. PLEASE. We WANT you to carry your grandson. We WANT you to play piano. We WANT you to walk in the park. Begin NOW. Yours truly, Heart, Lungs, Muscles, and Mind * * * **Nancy Jorgensen** is a Wisconsin writer, educator, musician, and regular blood donor. She is the mother of a high school English teacher and the 2016 Olympic gold medalist in women’s triathlon. Her essays appear in HuffPost, Business Insider, _The Offing_ , _River Teeth_ , Wisconsin Public Radio, and elsewhere. Her most recent book is a middle-grade sports biography, _Gwen Jorgensen: USA’s First Olympic Gold Medal Triathlete_ (Meyer & Meyer Sport). Find her @Nancjoe on Instagram and at NancyJorgensen.weebly.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🚶‍♀️💪 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🥩🍗 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 📖📚 designed by Anna Hall; and 🛌 😴 delivered to our 2,773 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jun 4, 2025 “Artifact” by Darien Hsu Gee | Faults and fractures. Jun 5, 2024 “Banana-Strawberry Smoothie” by Emily Chao | A first responder’s first loss. Jun 7, 2023 “Glazed Ham, April 1996” by Todd Kliman | A gleaming source of guilt. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Some beer-soaked dance floor in a bar outside Boulder. I’m twenty-eight or twenty-nine, wild inside a pocket of bodies and an I’ve-gone-away mind, lifting a sweaty bottle of two-buck beer above my head like a lantern. He’s watching from the crowd’s edge. Since he moved in months ago, I devise ways to disentangle, disappear. Distance has become a habit. Night after night, I sit on the end of a faded futon while he sleeps in the next room. I drink until the wine takes me down the back roads of bad choices, where I retrace missed exits, check my rearview for deleted messages and unanswered knocks on the door of my last apartment in Lubbock. In the dark, I stare at the snow-burdened trees outside our windows. Glass after glass after glass. One Saturday afternoon, I slip away to the patio of a pub, where I sip Chardonnay and listen to the skitter of leaves (brisk wind). He pulls up a chair. I pull a book from my bag. I have a history of this: _leave me be_. ~~~ It’s been years, almost twenty, and I remember how he and I moved in the dark—his chest against my back, the way I asked him to do it. The way my cries rang as loud as our neighbors’ wall phone upstairs. The way our neighbors shyly smirked at us most mornings. Those mornings he lumbered up the steps and ducked out the door on his way to work in those Carhartts, that beard. I’m thinking of this because a few nights ago, I fell into bed with a bearded stranger who wore Carhartts. That cotton gold like a lantern. It takes so little to take me back. It’s like that moment in Sarah Manguso’s _The Guardians_ : “I know it isn’t him, but when I see someone who resembles him I stare, take in as much information as possible.” So how much could I take in when I took him inside me? I can’t be the only one who sometimes moves in the dark with memory. I can’t remember my way around any city I’ve left behind. So much gone. I have a history of going, of going back, of thinking _go away,_ _go away,_ _go away_. Right now I’m sitting in the booth of a faded bar along a highway on my way back to Texas. I’m staring out a dusty window (wobbly table, sweaty bottle). Greyhound bus, UPS double-trailer, white construction truck, car, car, blue pickup, SUV, cement truck, semi, semi, semi. On the other side of the highway, trees bend in the spring wind. * * * **Jill Talbot** is the author of _The Last Year: Essays_ , based on her 2019–20 Paris Review Daily column. She’s also the author of _The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir_ and _Loaded: Women and Addiction_ , a collection of personal essays. Her writing has appeared in journals such as _Agni_ , _Brevity_ , _Gulf Coast_ , _Hotel Amerika_ , _LitMag_ , and _Southwest Review_ , and has been recognized seven times in The Best American Essays series. She has been a featured writer for Aquinas College’s Contemporary Writers Series, University of San Francisco’s Emerging Writers Festival, and The Literary Arts Institute at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, among others. Learn more at jilltalbot.net and on Instagram @jill.l.talbot. This essay first appeared in Brevity #62 (2019). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🍻 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 📖 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 💭 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🛻 delivered to our 2,767 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 28, 2025 “Crushed” by Wendy Fontaine | Young love, young heartbreak. May 29, 2024 “Pantoum for 1979” by Brenda Miller | Two steps forward, one step back. May 31, 2023 “Library with Hyacinth, Girl, and Guns” by Sue William Silverman | A still life. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Right now my biracial three-year-old thinks Africa is a place he can find on an old laminated map of the Bronx. He knows what a flag is but not what it’s for. He doesn’t know what it means when, after leaving a park on the outskirts of my family’s hometown in North Carolina, we see an oversized pickup truck sporting two Confederate flags, one at each corner of the cab. I don’t know what it means, either. When I was growing up, a white mother with a biracial child might push the child’s head down at a stoplight to avoid getting hassled. My olive-skinned grandfather used to tell me a joke about God having burned black people in the oven. White people, apparently, were underdone. Black people: burned; white people: half-baked. Got it. My son’s first words to me this morning after opening his eyes: _Prove it_. In the past two days, he’s become very excited about the Indian buffet; the concept of gravity; his sense of sight (_I’m using my sense of looking! Look out!_). Pulling up to the Indian buffet, he lets out a series of yells. _Are you excited about life?_ I ask. _Yes!_ he replies. _How does it work?_ This morning, at the breakfast table, he says something that sounds like “free bird,” so I start singing Skynyrd to him, the words I know, which are not many. He turns his face to the window then, the sun illuminating the traces of paint on his face I thought I’d washed off after yesterday’s art project. He bares his teeth in some semblance of smile plus warrior grimace, keeping his eyes closed even after the song has ended, taking a sun bath. Finally he opens them and looks at me, holding my eyes with his own while telling me about it. _I took up the sky._ * * * **Joanna Penn Cooper** is the author of a book of lyrical prose vignettes, _The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis_ (Brooklyn Arts Press); the poetry books _What Is a Domicile_ (Noctuary Press) and _Crown_ (Ravenna Press, winner of the Cathlamet Prize); and several chapbooks, including _Wild Apples: A Flash Memoir Collection with Writing Prompts_ and _Celebrity Ghost: Comics_ , both from Ethel Zine & Micro-Press. Her next full-length book of prose and poems, _When We Were Fearsome_ , is forthcoming from Ethel in 2027. She lives in Durham, NC, with her impish 13(!)-year-old and a cat named Oz. Find her on Substack at _Muse with JPC_. This essay first appeared in Talking River Review (2017). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🗺️ edited by Hattie Fletcher; 💬 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 👀 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was ☀️ delivered to our 2,761 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 21, 2025 “Celebration #50: August 2010” by Barry Maxwell | A birthday toast. May 22, 2024 “Parable” by Matthew Harkins | Strangers on a train. May 24, 2023 “My Sister Used to Give Me Blank Journals for My Birthday” by Beth Ann Fennelly | She knew I’d need them. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Two miles inland from the mouth of the Kennebec River, where the waters swirl a brackish dance between the rhythmic tidal pressures of the Atlantic Ocean and the steady push of watershed draining out a wedge of central Maine, on the granite flanks of the eastern shore, there stands an ancient cedar tree. This tree is not tall, but it is massive: four or five muscular trunks rising out of a common base of braided roots gripping a low rock ledge just above the high-tide mark. Behind the tree, furry thickets of scarlet sumac bushes slowly fill a clearing, and beyond them a pine-lined ridge heaves up to stand sentinel over this stretch of river. To the west, across a half-mile expanse of water, the postcard-perfect hamlet of Phippsburg nestles under a similarly rugged ridge, a cluster of gray-shingled saltbox houses around a pristine white church spire. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I sought out this cedar tree for solace, trudging down a mile of gravel road through copses of young beech trees and older hemlock groves, past the mysterious void of an abandoned cellar hole rimmed with ferns, through the sumac-studded field to the river’s edge, where the cedar tree’s trunks arced upwards from their common base like fingers curling loosely over an upturned palm, draped in fine, moss-green foliage. Many times, I climbed down into that beckoning hand to cuddle into its sinewy curves, laying my cheek on its fibrous bark. I would lie there late afternoons, watching the sun sink low toward the far riverbank, casting a rosier glow as it approached the horizon, its rays refracting through the lower swaths of atmosphere to reflect off Kennebec waters and angle up into my cradled hideaway, warming my face for a lingering while. I carried heavy, preteen boy feelings in my heart in those days, and being a boy, I couldn’t share them with any other human, or even give them dimension, or a name. I knew the feelings were large and steeped in loneliness, shaped by the presence of familiar people who acted out in ways beyond my understanding. There was the girl in my sixth-grade class I wanted to love, but she scorned me. There was my mother, who seemed to carry her own particular weight of sadness around with her, and though she tried to put on a good face and keep a good household and say appropriate motherly things to me and my brothers, she would sometimes be pulled under by her feelings, lost in herself. There was my father, who worked hard to meet his responsibilities at the hospital and care for his patients, always a pager-beep away from another crisis, who threw off subtle signals that he would like to be more kind and loving but didn’t quite know how to express that desire. I sensed, too, that somewhere, secrets were being kept from me. Boys weren’t supposed to have these wallowing feelings; they were just supposed to take actions and execute them competently, stuff like math and soccer and, later on, interpreting electrocardiograms and assessing heart murmurs and writing research grants; do them all without complaining much or feeling the ache of not being loved enough. Curled up in the cedar’s roots, aligning my youthful bones with its ancient contours, I could feel my heartaches settle, dilute, seep down into the organic mass of the tree. I imagined the tree absorbing them gently, along with the stream water that trickled down the riverbank, and the moisture from the waves of fog that sometimes rolled inland. I felt secure, held by this living being who had remained serenely rooted to one quiet ledge for centuries, growing incrementally in wisdom, bearing witness to the intersections of ocean and river, land and sky, a small boy and his unknowable fears. The tree didn’t require anything of me beyond my tiny warmth and weight on its roots; it loved me unconditionally through those baffling young years, and when twilight spread across the river and first stars began to ride the rippled waters, I could uncurl myself from its cupped embrace and make my way back up the gravel track toward dinner and home, less afraid of all I couldn’t yet see. * * * **Robbie Gamble** ’s nonfiction work has appeared in _Consequence_ , _Pangyrus_ , _Pithead Chapel_ , and _Tahoma Literary Review_. His essay “Exit Wound” was cited as a Notable selection in _The Best American Essays 2020_. He is the poetry editor for _Solstice Literary Magazine_ , and he divides his time between Boston and an apple orchard in Vermont. This essay first appeared in Tahoma Literary Review (2020). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 👦 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🌳 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🌳👦 designed by Anna Hall; and 🌳👦💭 delivered to our 2,757 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 14, 2025 “Sitting at the island in my kitchen” by Margaret Rozga | Conjuring worlds. May 15, 2024 “Haunted” by Steph Liberatore | How soon is too soon to panic? May 17, 2023 “Men Seeking Men” by Will Howard | Everyone’s looking for something. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Let’s say your eight-year-old daughter is a climber: railings, fences, utility boxes. Let’s say trees are her favorite. Every June, when the mulberries ripen, she scales the branches and stuffs her cheeks like a hamster, returning with sticky purple hands and a grin. Let’s say her climbing makes your heart leap up your throat, so you have to swallow hard to stuff it back down. Let’s say your husband is a rigger and works at heights, and you’ve heard him teach her about safety—to keep three points of contact at all times, to look ahead to where she is going. He reminds you repeatedly to trust in him, to trust in her. But let’s say that even though you want to, you can’t help it: the vision of her slipping and falling strong-arms you every time she’s off the ground. So you tell her not to climb high. You tell her to come down. Let’s say that in your parents’ backyard, your daughter scuttles up a wooden post. Like a ladybug climbing a stalk, she scootches hands and feet, limbs nimble and swift. Your anxiety starts to climb, too. And let’s say your dad watches from his back porch, tight-lipped and frowning; you know his look of disapproval, ingrained from your own childhood. Let’s say that at the top of the wooden post, two wide and thick beams cross horizontally. Empty hooks at every end wait for baskets of red geraniums and purple and yellow pansies to be hung. Your daughter clambers to the top, her silver sequined shoes flashing, hand-me-downs from her cousin that she insisted on wearing. Let’s say she calls out, “Hi, Mama!” and waves frantically. You stop breathing with the thought she’ll throw herself off balance. She creeps across one beam on all fours. Rests her head and belly, lounging jaguar-like, arms and legs dangling. Like she’s warming in the sun. You can almost hear her purring. And let’s say your father steps closer. You know he’s about to say the kind of thing he said to you as a kid, with his voice low and stern, full of _be careful_ and _it’s too dangerous_. So often it became your voice. His limitations absorbed as your own. And let’s just say, you don’t want this for your daughter. Maybe you wave back at her. Maybe you turn to your dad, a hand on his shoulder. Maybe you tell him, “Hey, Dad, it’s okay. She can do this.” And maybe your daughter hears you say this, too. * * * **Lina Lau** is a green tea drinker, mother, and writer from Toronto, Canada. Her creative nonfiction appears in _River Teeth_ , _Hippocampus Magazine_ , _XRAY Literary Magazine_ , _Sky Island Journal_ , and elsewhere. She's currently working on a memoir of flash and fragmented essays exploring identity, motherhood, intergenerational connection, and raising her daughters differently than how she was raised. She owns too many notebooks and writes during the in-between moments of work and parenting. Find her on Instagram @_linalau_ and on Bluesky @linalau.bsky.social. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🌳 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🧗‍♂️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 💬 designed by Anna Hall; and 👋 delivered to our 2,762 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 7, 2025 “Orb Weaver Spider Catcher” by Krista Lee Hanson | Home-wrecker. May 8, 2024 “In the Absence of Hugs” by Rachel Furey | Things you can’t buy online. May 10, 2023 “Quick, Write Something” by Brittany Hailer | A monologue of early motherhood. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

_I wasn’t good at ponytails or braids_ ,__ Mom says, lifting a freshly rinsed chicken from the sink and laying it on an expanse of foil, _but this I do well_.__ She wraps a just-right length of string around the wings, ties an elegant knot—precise as the surgeon she might have been if she hadn’t decided the hours were incompatible with kids. I’ve tried telling her the ponytails weren’t important, that it all worked out anyway because my sister was good at hair, but decades later, she still apologizes as she pins the thighs to the body with the poultry needles that live in the top corner drawer. She ties another knot around the legs. Her ring waits on the windowsill. I wonder if she struggled with braids because I struggled with sitting still and smiling for photographs. As if she is the daughter, I hate to think of her eyeing absurd standards, feeling she doesn’t measure up. Mom sets a lemon in what remains of the bird’s throat and seals the flap of skin with another needle, another deft loop of string. How much of motherhood is simply holding things together? I don’t ask. The lemon is because I love their smell. I love the warmth in the kitchen, but I remain unconvinced by the myth that motherhood is good for women. I watch her run a final needle under the chicken’s backbone. _The trick is not to puncture your own finger_ ,__ she tells me. At nearly forty, I remain in awe of her competence, which is perhaps another myth, one I am letting her teach me as I finally learn to cook flesh. I follow her instructions to fit the rack over the bed of peeled vegetables, to grease it ever so lightly. She lowers the chicken into its cradle and I squat the roasting pan into the oven for her. It’s easier to obey now than it was at fourteen; it’s a strange, raw thing to honor a mother by not becoming one—to accept the slippery weight of the freedom you’ve been handed. I hold the platter steady, later, to catch the roast as she turns it off the rack. It’s absolutely a kind of witchcraft how perfect the chicken turns out—witchcraft and the patience to let it rest undisturbed for nearly an hour after cooking. The lemon is still whole and bright when we pull it from the bird. * * * **Ceridwen Hall** is a poet and educator. Her books include _Acoustic Shadows_ (Broadstone Books) and _The School for Danger and Other Studies_ (forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2026). Other work has appeared in _TriQuarterly_ , _Pembroke Magazine_ , _The Cincinnati Review_ , _Craft_ , _Poet Lore_ , and other journals. You can find her at www.ceridwenhall.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🍗🚰 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 💍🪟 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🍋🪡 designed by Anna Hall; and 🧅🥕🥔 ⏲️ delivered to our 2,757 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 30, 2025 “Small Town Boy” by Mark Hendrickson | He was different. May 1, 2024 “Aint Brittany” by Brooke Champagne | Some bodies are built for flight. May 3, 2023 “Changing Lanes” by Mimi Schwartz | Just keep swimming. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

A few years back, I was visiting my older sister at her college in DC, visiting with my parents, who wanted to hit the bars with their daughter, as their parents had done with them, as any good parents do, while I went to see a movie; at the time, I was very much into film, and although I am still very much into film, back then I had tried to get into the habit of scrawling little notes in this little notebook that I had specifically for this purpose, specifically for scrawling little notes during movies, that is, and my parents dropped me off at the theater for a 10 p.m. screening of a documentary I had never heard of or seen playing anywhere else, called _Carol Doda Topless at the Condor_ , which I was very excited for, since I always tried very hard to see the nichest, strangest stuff playing when I was in a new city, stuff I couldn’t see anyplace else—and having seen it now, I can tell you how strange it is, this documentary about Carol Doda, cocktail waitress turned stripper who made international headlines in the 1960s for her act at the Condor Club in San Francisco, a club where she performed as the first ever public topless dancer in the US; Carol Doda, who famously began her act by being lowered onto the stage from the ceiling atop a hydraulic-rigged grand piano, a mechanism which would, in 1983, crush an assistant manager to death; Carol Doda, who would undergo a total of forty-four injections of silicone directly into her body, reportedly enlarging her breasts from size 34B to eventually 44DD, breasts which were insured for $1.5 million in today’s cash—and yeah, this film is certainly strange, but of course I don’t know this at the time, I don’t know a lot of things, I simply walk through the dreary little carpeted theater, my big, round cheeks stung from harsh DC winter winds, all the way to the screening room, and I see three extraordinarily dressed women leaning against the wall outside the room, smug and lording, in feather boas and headdresses and sparkling bodysuits and heels and gloves and garters and makeup and beads and sequins and fringe and anything and everything you can imagine, all in a line—a yellow girl, an orange girl, and a pink girl—and, mind you, this is the era of the Barbie movie, with people getting dolled up for the theater, so I just think to myself, _wow, this Doda lady must really be something special if people get this dressed up to go see her film at ten on a Friday night_ , and I walk past, intimidated by their gentle scowls and strong perfume, and I sit, in my frumpy knit sweater and thick, tiered, ankle-long skirt, in a seat just a few rows up from the screen, and I pull out my little notebook and write the date, time, title, and theater name at the top of the little page, and I wait, wait until the lights finally dim, and the trailers drag on and on, and then, finally, a voice erupts from the speakers and thanks me for being here and announces that “IN ORDER TO PAY TRIBUTE TO THIS ICON OF THE PAST, WE MUST HONOR THE DIVAS OF THE PRESENT,” and a spotlight blinks on and the three women, yellow and orange and pink, skin-stretching smiles plastered, come on out, strutting into the aisle, staring and pointing and gyrating and bumping shoulders up and down to the music, gesturing cheekily, slowly pulling gloves off with teeth, pasties revealed, garments tossed, strewn across the dirty grounds of the empty theater, all for an audience of one seventeen-year-old, frumpy, chubby, pimply little freakshow, pen and notebook in hand, speechless. * * * **Mia Carbone** is entering her junior year as an English and communications double major at the University of Pittsburgh. She likes movies and women. More on Instagram @mia.and.her.scraps. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 📽️ edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🎞️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 💃💃💃 designed by Anna Hall; and 📓 delivered to our 2,758 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 23, 2025 “Literally Any” by Jeanette Mrozinski | In search of hope. Apr 24, 2024 “Once, a Moon” by Karin Killian | The writing on the wall. Apr 26, 2023 “Whiting” by Deesha Philyaw | A story of six breakfasts. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

My father once called from deep within his dementia and left a strange voicemail. Two minutes and seventeen seconds of rambling half-coherence, halting, alternating between an easy but nonsensical fluency and long pauses punctuated by his familiar cough, his laugh, as if he was pulling himself together, is still pulling himself together and out of the grave, clearing his throat. He laughed at himself as he failed to find the thread. Laughed again and said he had pictures of me as a kid that he couldn’t see because his macular degeneration turned them into a page of colors, a smudge that was once the image of his son. I assumed my stepmother told him what or who was in the photo. The owner of the face he knew he should recognize but couldn’t see. When and how and where the photo had been taken, the person or place captured. Or maybe he was holding a piece of paper, a takeout menu, nothing. _Hey, bud_ , he said, _are you on the slopes today?_ _Have you got a new ski outfit?_ I wasn’t. I don’t ski. One minute and thirty-seven seconds in, he grew lucid and told my voicemail that they—he and my stepmother—had passed the first test to get affordable housing in Toms River. He said it was near the shore, though he’d never been a beachgoer, spending our family vacations hunkered under an umbrella, nose in a book. Then his hopeful tone disappeared. Confusion and fear entered his voice, the whisper of it. He cleared his throat again, said, _I’m doing some downhill skiing. Won’t take too long_. He never skied but I wondered if he might be trying, through metaphor or allegory, to break out of his dementia to tell me something important. Some vital report from the front. I see him as he was then, all rickety fragility, looking closer to ninety than seventy, careening downhill, out of control, eager to hit the bottom and hoping it wouldn’t take too long. Maybe I _was_ skiing. Maybe we are all skiing. United in our descent, though he pulled ahead of me and finished his run five years ago—one jump, one turn really, an outline obscured by the falling snow. In the final years of his life, I received many of these calls. Voicemails with nothing but minutes of static, the sounds of fingers fumbling with the phone or the fabric of his pocket brushing against it. Voicemails with his familiar voice, almost steady, slow but intelligible, asking the usual questions, saying _hi_ and _take care_ and _call me_. I returned the calls and listened to my father butcher the plot of _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ or _GoodFellas_ or _The Last of the Mohicans_. His favorite movies, movies I’d seen with him a dozen times. I listened to him slowly get wrong the names of the actors, the director, the setting. And I humored him. As the plots unraveled, I almost wished he were right. That the movies existed as he remembered them, strange mishmashes of classics where a young Jack Nicholson escaped Nurse Ratched, joined the mob, and carried a musket on his way up the Hudson to the besieged British fort. I imagined my father imagining himself as a hero in the scene, hobbling after Jack, wearing a hospital gown and carrying a tomahawk, marching to the oddly fitting soundtrack of a Tony Bennett number, his smooth crooning echoing through the firs and ferns of colonial America as it echoes now through me. I couldn’t tell what was true, which of my father’s stories were new to me because his mind had shrunk and shaken loose older, hidden memories, like the apples we picked when I was a kid, the tiny, tart ones you could only reach with a basket on a pole or a ladder, or if he’d lost it completely toward the end. Was he bullshitting me like he used to, enjoying watching me struggle to decide how gone he was, to decide whether it was okay to laugh? At one point he told me he used to have lunch with Tony Bennett at a deli near Columbus Circle in New York in the seventies. My father had a job selling ties. There was a recording studio close to his office and Tony Bennett, hardworking showman that he was, spent his days recording and his nights performing at a nearby club. They could have crossed paths often enough there, two regulars meeting over soups and grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee, to chew and smoke and chat. My father couldn’t remember what they talked about but he said he used to call his famous lunchmate Anthony. I like to think of my father frozen in that memory, a choice scrap of meat in aspic. Something to come back to, to gnaw. A clean linoleum counter; hot, cheap coffee served in heavy, white chipped mugs; the smell of grease, of frying bacon and aftershave and cigarettes; the city bustling outside, the ties practically selling themselves. Maybe Mr. Bennett sings a tune or two. Or better yet, saving his voice for the studio but so full of song he can’t stay silent, he hums. My father, though tone-deaf, can’t resist it. Doesn’t want to. Full of something, he feels himself begin to hum. _Hey, bud_ , he always said. Said until he didn’t. Couldn’t. _Hey, pops_ , I say now to no one, waiting for a call that never comes. * * * **Kent Kosack** is a writer based in Pittsburgh. He has recent work in _Minor Literature[s]_ , _Heavy Feather Review_ , _3:AM Magazine_ , _Some Words_ , and elsewhere. His novella, _Adar’s Freedom_ , is available now through Subtle Body Press. You can read more at kentkosack.net. This essay first appeared in Tin House Online (2018). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 📱 edited by Hattie Fletcher; ⛷️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🎥 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was ☕ delivered to our 2,748 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 16, 2025 “Pitch” by Rasma Haidri | Perfect. Apr 17, 2024 “Sour Grass” by Victoria Lewis | A taste of the unknown. Apr 19, 2023 “Recense (been looking)” by Patrick Madden | “An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure.” [Neil Peart] Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

It was Saturday at the indoor farmers market, and I was half awake as I stood in line for pickles. “Where are you from?” the vendor asked. My stomach clenched. It was soon after the Muslim ban in early 2017. I named a wealthy suburb (a true-enough answer), and then shame filled my belly. In this sea of white faces, his was brown like mine. He was probably just seeking connection, for where I was from before. I’ll never know. I took my quart of sour pickles and joined the crowd in search of the best loaf of artisan bread. * * * **Maya Benattar** is a music psychotherapist and writer. Her client work and writing focus on family stories, intergenerational trauma, and an inherited sense of “otherness.” More at mayabenattar.com and on Instagram @mayabenattar. This essay first appeared in Five Minutes (2024). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🥒 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🫐 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🍅 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🍞 delivered to our 2,746 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 9, 2025 “Still” by Casey Mulligan Walsh | Knowing yet not knowing. Apr 10, 2024 “The Annual Bonfire, 1998” by Lynette D’Amico | Secrets in the smoke. Apr 12, 2023 “God Don’t Like Ugly” by Brian Broome | The bus bully gets schooled. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Not the girls leaning against the pool table, not the men ignoring their buzzing phones. No one has even stopped by our booth to congratulate you for the time you tackled the sixteenth-ranked running back in the NCAA Division III College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin. Everyone is pretending they have not read the poem I published in the preeminent literary journal of the central eastern northwestern Great Plains. They’ve all turned their backs to us, their eyes on the televisions. Ron R. spins the wheel again, and I shout, _I would like to solve the puzzle_. The whole bar erupts. You order another shot. Ten minutes go by. Still no one asks for our autographs. You detail again how you once outran the Baltimore Ravens starting wide receiver before he was the Baltimore Ravens starting wide receiver, and I pretend I have no idea that this story ends with you splayed on the ground, your helmet cracked like a head gasket. _This is how you love someone_ , I tell the waitress on my way to the bathroom, but she does not look up from the notes she’s taken about other people’s chili cheese fries. When I return, I find her offering you a free Irish car bomb, dropping it into the froth of your Guinness and laughing as you open up your throat like the mouth of a river. She slides into my seat at the table, takes your hand between her fingers. _Finally_ , I say to no one, the door to the men’s room swinging open. Finally someone who wants the one thing we have. * * * **Sarah Carson** ’s poetry and other writing have appeared in _The Rumpus_ , _The Slowdown_ , _Guernica_ , _The Missouri Review_ , and _The Christian Century_ , among others. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including _How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan_ (Persea Books, 2022). Born in Flint, Michigan, she now lives in East Lansing, where she is at work on a memoir about single motherhood, work, and the rules that govern the universe. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com. This essay first appeared in Rhino (2021). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🎱 🍻 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🏈 📖 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🥃 🍟 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🫳🫲 delivered to our 2,746 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 2, 2025 “An Open Letter to Pastor Andrew” by Sarah Carson | Trying to find grace. Apr 3, 2024 “Note to Old Irishtown Road” by Karen Weyant | Apologies. Apr 5, 2023 “Elijah” by Brenda Miller | At Passover, opening the door to possibility. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

_“Maybe we’ll go wind tasting”_ Perhaps, but only if there’s time. We’ll sample many varietals: breeze, whisper, gale. Winds assume the flavor of the land in which they originate—a _terroir—_ and vary by how long they’ve aged. Cup them first in your palms. Take your time (though I know your time is fleeting). Smell the nuances: a hint of lavender, a soupçon of apple, a tinge of salt. Try a chinook first, with its glacial overtones. Or perhaps a Santa Ana will be more to your liking, with its dry, hot finish? A sirocco has a playful hint of spice: is it cardamom? saffron? coriander? A mistral could be the winner. Blind yourself and take a sip: first through the nose, then the lips. Let the mistral play along the tongue. Think of France, that time you walked alone in a village at sunrise, your heart breaking in silence. The ancient buildings looked on; cobblestones swayed beneath your feet. Can you remember the taste of dawn? You could never describe it: the way this wind takes you away. ~~~ _“She looks deep in_ _though”_ Yes, she is. Deep in the unreal tense. Or in the alternate real, where all things are possible. Perhaps she never had the miscarriages. Perhaps she was well enough to marry that boyfriend. Perhaps she didn’t spend her last two years of college taking care of a drunk man. In the land of though, the future is built of flimsy wood, like a stage set—easily dismantled and reassembled. She studied theater in college, learned all the key skills: acting, playwriting, stage management. She built a miniature set for an Edward Albee play, _A Delicate Balance_. She used dollhouse furniture—tiny chairs and couches, impossibly small wineglasses and teacups—to create a space where a family teeters on the edge of chaos. She played minor roles in classic dramas— _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie_ , say, or _Awake and Sing!_ She learned to wait in the wings for her cue, costumed, her face silky with powder. She became characters thought up by someone else, embodiments of another’s imagination. ~~~ _“This fills me with hop”_ You know the feeling. It came over you all the time as a child: the overwhelming need to jump, to stand on one leg and skip, the ground rising to propel you forward. You played hopscotch every day, drawing the court with your blue chalk, hopping as quick as you could through the squares, collecting your prize. Sometimes you hopped down the hall to your bedroom, or hopped along the curb to school. Mere walking was never enough—your body needed to be off-balance, then balanced, then off again. Your body could never hold with two feet on the ground. But eventually gravity seized you, and the ground became more solid, your blood settled in its veins. But you can imagine it still—the uplift, a sudden urge to fly. ~~~ _“Do you want to go to the god park?”_ Oh yes. Especially the off-leash area, where the gods run free. My god and I will enter through the double gate; he’s always a little wary at first, slinking behind my knees, but gets up his courage soon enough. I’ll unclip his leash and urge him, _go on boy, play!_ There’s a separate area for the small gods, though often they look wistfully through the chain link at the bigger gods who galumph and wrestle across the grass. Always, there’s one god who wants to steal the show, grabbing every ball and stick, running with his head held high, baiting anyone to chase him. Always there’s one owner who refuses to clean up after her god, willfully turning a blind eye. Sometimes it’s all too much for us, my god and me. We sit quietly on a bench and watch. I feed him small treats and murmur _good god_ under my breath. We leave the way we came, walk the trail around the lake, tethered happily to one another. _Who’s_ _a good god? You are!_ My god stops to sniff the air, the ground, a tree—always on the scent of some invisible thing. * * * **Brenda Miller** ’s first hybrid collection, _Love You, Bye: A Daughter’s Journey in Essays and Poems_ , is forthcoming from Skinner House Books in April 2026. She is the author of six essay collections, including _A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form_ , and a poetry chapbook, _The Daughters of Elderly Women_. She cowrote, with Suzanne Paola, the popular textbook _Tell It Slant_ , and her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She is professor emerita of creative writing at Western Washington University. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com. This essay first appeared in Brevity #54 (2017). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🌬️ edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🎭 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and ⏫ designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🌩️ delivered to our 2,595 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ****PS/**** This Saturday (3/28) we’ll be celebrating the three-year anniversary of Short Reads with an event at White Whale Bookstore. We’d love to see you there. Details below. ### **From the archive** Mar 26, 2025 “Often There Are Bears” by Randon Billings Noble | From the window to the wall. Mar 27, 2024 “One Rule from a Working Life” by Nina Gaby | Some nights I dream. Mar 29, 2023 “The History of Color” by Beth Kephart | The shades of life and loss. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * * ## Celebrate 3 Years of Short Reads! **White Whale Books | March 28 | 7–8:30 pm** We are ecstatic to celebrate our three-year anniversary with a reading in collaboration with Autumn House Press at White Whale Books! The anniversary party will feature readings by Robert Yune, M.S. Reagan, Hallie Pritts, and Ren Cedar Fuller. Event details → ---

Today I split open my garlic seed, bulb to clove. I found a clump of my hair in the compost, saved from the salon, now the color of grass clippings rotted black. I built the garlic beds back up by hand; for some reason, this felt right—the soil had an odd texture after a summer of drought. Everyone who doesn’t farm tells me I should write about farming. No one asks me to write about writing. Writers are always writing about writing—forever trying to reveal the trick. The truth is, it’s too arcane to matter, even to other writers. But farming, that’s something you can sink your hands and teeth into; you can really get a grip on that shovel and dig deep. Garlic makes me sentimental. It’s planted around my birthday, and for years on big farms, the crew would celebrate with me as we pushed the cloves into the ground. I turned forty yesterday. I’m imagining garlic planting days twenty years ago. I write using the language of agrarian people. We all speak using this language born from the earth. We reap and sow and plow and harvest, though very few of us have done any of these in the literal sense. To feel the rhythm of cut and step, the sickle handle oiled with sweat. To sharpen the knife, the axe. What are you doing? my boyfriend asks over the phone. Sharpening my axe. For what? he asks. Splitting wood. As I worked, I listened to an audiobook about British spies. I drank an energy drink. I covered the can with a work glove because I fear drinking a hornet. But the hornets are all dead now. This morning, the dog found where a bear had dug up a ground nest, the combs scattered, the eggs bone white. What you really want to know—was it beautiful? My knees were wet. The tiller that I bought five years ago has developed the eccentricities of a tool toward the end of its life. I now have to perform the starting sequence in reverse, and it will pulse to life, then thrum against the ground. Only as I write this does it feel beautiful. Only as I write this do I feel a flush of cold, and pause, my hands dry and warm over the keys. Tomorrow I’ll plant. The soil will be cold, slightly frozen on top. My hands don’t mind the cold much now, the nerves quieted from all the years outside. I used to make the crew stand in silence for a moment before we began planting the garlic. Remembering all the hands that had shaped the seed. What a self-righteous manager. The garlic doesn’t need silence or remembering. The thing with poetry is that if you see it, you see it. And when you do, when you see rain on the fuzzy cheek of the skunk cabbage, or the goldfinch surfing the sunflower heads, or the black of your hair black in the soil, there aren’t words, really, that can do it justice. * * * **Megan Baxter** has won numerous national awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Her essay collection _Twenty Square Feet of Skin_ was longlisted for the 2024 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She has published three books of creative nonfiction and is currently writing short stories and novels. Megan lives in New Hampshire, where she runs her own small farm and teaches creative writing through online courses and lessons. More at meganbaxterwriting.com and @meganlbaxter on Instagram. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🧄 edited by _****Hattie Fletcher****_; 🪓 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🐝 designed by _****Anna Hall****_; and 🌻 delivered to our 2,570 subscribers by _****Stephen Knezovich****_. ****PS/**** Next Saturday (3/28) we’ll be celebrating the three-year anniversary of __Short Reads__ with an event at White Whale Bookstore. We’d love to see you there. Details below. ### **From the archive** Mar 19, 2025 **“Would Have Been”** by Montserrat Andrée Carty | The road not taken. Mar 20, 2024 **“Rockhound”** by Loretta Velle | The things we collect. Explore the entire _Short Reads_ archive. * * * ## Celebrate 3 Years of Short Reads! **White Whale Books | March 28 | 7–8:30 pm** We are ecstatic to celebrate our three-year anniversary with a reading in collaboration with Autumn House Press at White Whale Books! The anniversary party will feature readings by Robert Yune, M.S. Reagan, Hallie Pritts, and Ren Cedar Fuller. Event details → ---

In seventh grade science, we dissected cows’ eyes with Miss Susan, a young teacher who was not a nun like the other teachers. She walked around the classroom, plopping an eye on a piece of cardboard on top of our paired desks, mocking the girls for being all girly, shrieking and ewwing. And then, of course, it was a boy who got sick, Bob Richards. She was gentle with him, shooting a stare back at us while leading him into the hallway. Where she got the eyes, we never knew. Round, gelatinous, they sat in front of us, and we imagined them quivering when it was we ourselves who quivered. Each pair got one scalpel, though she insisted we take turns. “We all need to experience the cutting,” she said. Miss Susan was very short, and with her pixie haircut she resembled Mary Martin in _Peter Pan_ on TV. I was already taller than her, though my body was half-empty with everything I didn’t know. I had to bend down to ask her permission to go to the restroom. I was not sick like Bob, but I was my own kind of sick—more in the head, thinking about a cow staring at me in unwavering and accurate judgement like a nun in religion class when I dared to ask that one-word question, “Why?” We sliced the eyes open and examined the goop. We tried to identify the various parts. I sat with Sue Grabowski, who had once wet her pants in second grade but was on her way to becoming our homecoming queen in high school. We were all on our way to becoming. Sue was impatient with my clumsy cuts and smears. Give me that, she said. Let me do it, she said. And I did. The fishy smell reminded me of the one time I’d been to the ocean and had nearly drowned. I didn’t follow up with biology in the public high school across the street. One eye was enough for me. I took Electronics and Earth Science with the other dumb kids. Rocks were more my speed. Bald, skeletal Mr. Bubble taught Earth Science. “Bubble” was not his real name. I saw a picture once of the painting _The Scream._ It might’ve been on a T-shirt. The guy in the picture looked like Mr. Bubble. In Electronics, big gum-chewing Mr. Southern passed along his wisdom to our all-male class: “No matter how you shake and dance, a few drops always ends in your pants.” Miss Susan changed to Ms. over Christmas break. What’s anyone’s real name? All the sisters were named after saints. Ms. Susan was my saint. I had a crush on her, on the clear truth of her and everything she said, though I realized it only in retrospect, after the nuns on one side and _The Scream_ and the wise man of pissing on the other. She blew the minds of those who paid attention. She took us to see _2001: A Space Odyssey_ in Cinerama at a downtown Detroit theater and to Earth Day in Ann Arbor, where I bought a Give Earth a Chance button that still rattles in one of my drawers beneath the soft fabric of clothes I no longer wear. In our little anonymous subdivision on the border with Detroit, in an all-white subdivision dominated by car factories whose pollution in our skies was the smell of money, we’d been taught not to look up or down. Or even in the general direction of Detroit, which was simmering with racial unrest. Just taking a bus across Eight Mile Road and into the city many of our parents had abandoned had us steaming the windows. I’m not saying I understood the entire movie, but a talking computer gave me a lot to ponder. She also explained the science of reproduction to us, drawing and erasing pictures on the chalkboard with such fierceness that no one dared giggle. When Kevin Warren asked her how the sperm got to the egg, she gave the slightest little smirk. Kevin was the oldest in a family of Warrens. His father was named Wally. Wally should have explained a few things to his oldest boy. I don’t know if anyone else saw the smirk. I felt it was a secret thing between me and her, just a slight wind blowing through a crack in the wall between our lives. Then she said, with a straight face: “It swims.” Which is, of course, true. The bell rang, which was maybe a blessing for all of us. Some of us were already groping each other in the adolescent pool of our young lives. Kevin was still splashing his water wings in the shallow end. I saw her put a hand slightly against his back as he left the classroom. When I came back for my last year at St. Mark’s, she was gone. None of the nuns scurrying back and forth from the school to the convent at lunchtime mentioned her disappearance. Maybe there was a cow’s eye nobody wanted to touch in that story—once you cut it open, who knows what would come out? I think I can say with some confidence that she did not become a nun. It’s too easy to make fun of nuns, and kids with weak stomachs, and kids who are clueless about sex. I’ve just done all three, haven’t I? Also too easy to make fun of kids like me who never learned to correctly pronounce the _s_ sound without slurring, though that never kept her from calling on me. And I was half like those other kids, half sick to my stomach, half ignorant about sex. And half in love with a teacher whose last name we weren’t even expected to know. * * * **Jim Daniels** received the Michigan Author Award for 2025–26. _Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems_ was published in 2026, and _An Ignorance of Trees_ , nonfiction, was published in 2025. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🐄 👁️ edited by _****Hattie Fletcher****_; 🏫 🤢 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 📽️ 🧑‍🚀 designed by _****Anna Hall****_; and 🧑‍🏫 🌆 delivered to our 2,551 subscribers by _****Stephen Knezovich****_. ****PS/**** We’re looking for new flash essays. See the submission call → ### **From the archive** Mar 12, 2025 **“Of Peas and Pods”** by Anne Visser Ney | Unexpected sweetness. Mar 13, 2024 **“What Happened Here”** by Leslie Pietrzyk | It was just ice cream. Explore the entire _Short Reads_ archive. * * * We’re looking for new flash essays. See the submission call →

The way it worked was, he was twenty-three years older than me, not yet divorced, with joint custody of his two kids. And two weeks after we met—two weeks of sex and stumbling around smiling—I was leaving for India. For six months or maybe eight. The way it worked was that late on Sunday afternoons, when it was morning at home, I would wait in a small room in my colleague’s house in Varanasi, and he would call and we would talk until the fear of the phone bill grew too menacing. (This was the way it worked in the days before ubiquitous cell phones and Skype and WhatsApp.) Some weeks the room wasn’t available, and I sat in a public call booth on a jute bag stuffed with hay, listening to his now familiar voice, and sometimes I think I might be making up the hay part. But I remember the smell of it and the itch of the fibers in my nose, so I think I’m probably not. The way it worked was that seven months later, I came home, and although we had emailed daily in addition to the expensive weekly phone calls, we did not know each other in many fundamental ways and had to meet each other all over again. The way it worked was that he was still twenty-three years older and still not divorced and still had joint custody of his teenage daughters, one of whom hated me on sight. The way it worked was that despite all of the above, I would have moved in with him, but he wasn’t ready to move in with me, and given the speed of everything, I couldn’t really argue. The way it worked was that the years passed. He did, in fact, get divorced. I bought a house. The daughters became adults. We adopted four cats: three friendly black brothers and, later, one tortoiseshell, standoffish and impossibly fluffy. The way it worked was that we built a two-household, four-cat life, strong enough to last for seventeen years. The way it worked was that by then he wanted to share a house. I wanted it less, accustomed as I was to my house and my cats and a few nights a week with him. But also, the way it worked was that I did a lot of the work of the two-household relationship. I brought leftovers to work to leave in the office refrigerator so that when I stopped at his house after work, neither of us would have to cook. The way it worked was that this was not an area where he reciprocated, and even though I wasn’t pushing for him to move in, I could see how a change might improve my life too. The way it worked was that in the months before he was supposed to move in, things at my job got complicated, then terrible, then nearly unbearable. The way it worked was that he didn’t seem to be doing very well on the packing front and I was too busy to help him. The way it worked was that when I finally did help him, when he was already half moved into my house, I found the papers, hidden on a desk behind the (now enormous) fig tree I’d bought for ten dollars at the tropical plant sale at the Big Y back in 2005. The papers had been pulled out of a notebook, the paper smooth, the edges rough. The way it worked was that I wondered every day why he hadn’t burned them. There was a letter, a journal entry, in which I learned that eleven years earlier, he had had an affair. The way it worked was that I was too angry to even speak to him, let alone help him pack. The way it worked was that my therapist—clearly no stranger to stories of infidelity—asked, “Does the thing that happened eleven years ago outweigh everything that’s happened since?” The way it worked was that furious as I was, I had to say no, it didn’t. I let him finish moving the rest of his stuff in but made him sleep in the cottage with his cats for the first month. The way it worked was that even when I was still mad at him, it was quite nice to have someone else to build the fire and feed the cats and make the toast, but not the tea because the way it worked was that I was better at making the tea than he was, since he would forget to set the timer and also forget how long the tea had been brewing. The way it worked was that after he was all moved in and we were spending more time together than ever (much of it lovely), I started to realize exactly how much it was that he was forgetting. It turned out he was forgetting a lot. He was on his way to forgetting everything. The way it worked was that by the time I quit the job that had made me so miserable, I had another job waiting for me at home. The way it worked was I had to do all the remembering for both of us. The way it worked was that then there was a pandemic. The way it worked was that slowly, then quickly, he died. The way it worked was that over the next few years, one by one, all the black cats died too, old men all. The way it worked is that now our household is one house, one woman, one cat. She is seventeen and cranky and still impossibly fluffy. * * * **Sue Dickman** is a writer in western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in _The Washington Post_ , the _San Francisco Chronicle_ , _The Christian Science Monitor_ , _The Millions_ , _The Keepthings_ , and other publications. She is currently finishing a novel about, among other things, the impact of a dementia diagnosis on a complicated extended family. She received her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Oregon. Follow her on Instagram @sue_dickman. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🛫 🇮🇳 ☎️ edited by _****Hattie Fletcher****_; 🏡 🐈🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 📔 💭 designed by _****Anna Hall****_; and 🫖 🍵 ⏲️ delivered to our 2,511 subscribers by _****Stephen Knezovich****_. ****PS/**** We’re cohosting an off-site reading with our friends at __In Short__ , __Beautiful Things__ , and __Sweet Literary__ at AWP26. Join us on Thursday, March 5, 7–9 p.m. at Luckie’s Liquors in Power Plant Live for readings by Michael Copperman and Beth Ann Fennelly. ### **From the archive** Mar 5, 2025 **“Faster”** by Jackie Domenus | Love at 35 mph. Mar 6, 2024 **“Defiant”** by Kate Hopper | So we beat on. Explore the entire _Short Reads_ archive. * * * AWP26 Off-site event featuring Michael Copperman and Beth Ann Fennelly!

When you say _That makes sense_ , does it actually make sense? Or do you just say that when someone says something so crazy you don’t know what else to say? Do you ever think that anyone is truly crazy, or have you been trained to think of us as something else? What is it? Can you tell me? And then can we be friends when this is all over? Because you make me feel like things will be okay. But will they, really? Are you allowed to lie to patients? Were you drawn to this field because you too fell off the deep end once? Or was it because you never have, but from the safety of the lifeguard chair, you saw someone slip and believed you could do something about it? Or was there someone you held once but couldn’t save, and now you try to save us to make up for the one that got away? ​​​​​How does it feel to pull out someone who is drowning? Does it give you a high? Why else would you put yourself through all this? All the listening to someone talk about what it is like not to operate correctly, not to function in the brain sense, to stall out in the human sense. To stop working, like a deeply soaked thing that was never meant to get wet and is now impossibly heavy. ​ ​ Does it get old, all the brokenness? If you ever meet my mother, will you tell her she should have gone to you, decades ago, and still could? Since we are friends now? Can you tell her how you will listen and nod and look to the ceiling as if there are answers up there, in the panels, and then look back down with an idea, something to try to make everything hurt a little less? ​​​​​​​Tell her there are so many roads to better without having to leave her family the way I always feared she would, trading us for the quiet of a snowdrift. Tell her she doesn’t need to drive a car into a lake like her grown baby brother did, in the daylight, looking for answers under the water. She doesn’t talk about him much. Can you tell her she can, and that it makes sense if she does? That it makes sense if she doesn’t. * * * **Shannon Dale** is the mother of three young boys, a retired farmer and educator at thirty-nine, and an intrepid explorer of life with inflamed joints and eyeballs. She publishes a monthly advice column for fellow beleaguered parents as the Mediocre Mother on Substack and is proud to be one of the founding members of the Unreliable Narrators writing group in her home state of Montana. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was ❓🙋💭 edited by _****Hattie Fletcher****_; ❓🙋💭 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; ❓🙋💭 designed by _****Anna Hall****_; and ❓🙋💭 delivered to our 2,483 subscribers by _****Stephen Knezovich****_. ### **From the archive** Feb 26, 2025 **“Dig”** by Lorri McDole | A spy in the house of God. Feb 28, 2024 **“Birds I’ve Known”** by Yelizaveta Renfro | Parakeets, owls, and rooks. Oh my. Explore the entire _Short Reads_ archive. * * *

There was a moment in the 1980s when Bass shoes were all the rage. “Go Bass or Go Barefoot” was the brand’s snappy tagline, and its strappy Sunjuns were beloved for their comfort and durability. One of their biggest fans was my mother. For her, they were the holy grail of footwear, an open-toed shoe with a wide footbed and cushioned arch support to accommodate her inconsolable feet, which, like the rest of her body, were being ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis. My mother’s feet were gnarled and tormented, and her toes curled over each other at odd angles, like tangled tree roots. As the cartilage on her joints wore down, doctors at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan inserted pins, plates, and rods to fuse her bones, intricate procedures that entailed her being away for weeks at a time. I was seven years old when she had her first foot surgery. I would slip into her closet, hiding from my grandparents, in search of my mother. She wasn’t there, but her sturdy Bass shoes, with their adjustable leather straps and padded suede insoles, were patiently awaiting her return. In their boxes, they were stacked to the ceiling like books in the library: warm cinnamon ones for the winter, bone white for summer weddings, and a deep coral red for when her feet were feeling especially angry, she’d once told me. I’d open the boxes and inhale the chalky leather and musky scent left behind by her stockinged feet. Sometimes I would slide my feet into them, walking around the way some little girls strut in too-big three-inch heels. When she got home from the hospital that fall, she brought me a present she’d picked up at the hospital gift shop, a pair of little yellow wind-up shoes, with neat white plastic laces and red soles. She wanted to remind me I could go anywhere, in any shoes I chose. I’d take them to the foyer, wind them, and listen to their mechanical whirl as they whizzed across the floor. I often wished I could give my mother my sturdy, dependable feet, wished for a world in which she didn’t have to fumble across the house with a walker, grimacing, in pain. She continued to walk in her Sunjuns for another decade, their spongy softness soaking up each bracing step. My feet have remained sturdy and steady over the years, the arthritis skipping a generation. I still have the yellow shoes, nestled in a glass box in my bedroom, and sometimes I put them in the palm of my hand. I marvel at their smallness, their steadfastness. They’re all I have left of her, I tell my daughter. She winds the dial, and together we watch them walk their carefree steps, dancing in the dappled afternoon light. * * * **Alison Damast Dolinger** is a writer based in Irvington, New York. Her poetry has appeared in _Tarry_ magazine and the forthcoming Hudson Valley Arts Collective’s _Poems for a Wish_ anthology. She is a freelance journalist and holds an MS in journalism from Columbia Journalism School. When not writing, she can be found singing with the Manhattan Choral Ensemble and exploring the Hudson Valley with her family and goldendoodle. Follow her on Instagram @alidol79. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🦶 edited by _****Hattie Fletcher****_; 🏥 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🎁 designed by _****Anna Hall****_; and 👩‍👧 delivered to our 2,472 subscribers by _****Stephen Knezovich****_. ⚡ ****We’re halfway through Flash February**** , but it’s not too late. Join us here → ### **From the archive** Feb 19, 2025 **“Showering with Spiders”** by Victoria Doerper | It’s a small thing. Feb 21, 2024 **“Deluge”** by Cassandra Caverhill | In the aftermath. Explore the entire _Short Reads_ archive. * * * Full details here →

“I’m a neurosurgeon,” a man’s voice says when I finally decide to pull over and answer the unknown number that’s been calling, calling, calling while I’m driving and lost in a rainstorm. “Your aunt had a routine heart procedure at the hospital, and she’s now in recovery. But we’re concerned she’s not talking.” I don’t say anything. It’s blustery, and I’ve pulled to the side of one of the countless small roads that weave like veins through the cemetery. The gate I usually use is closed up tight. Rerouted, I can’t find my dad’s flat gravestone, one of hundreds peppered with rain and small flags for Veterans Day. “There’s a drug we can administer to clear her arteries if she had a small stroke, but there’s a risk of death, about six in a hundred.” I sit with those odds a second. _If_ there is a blood clot. _If_ there was a stroke. “I’m at a cemetery visiting my dad’s grave,” I share to explain my own not-talking. It’s been a few years now, but I think, _One death at a time_. “You’re dealing with a lot,” the neurosurgeon says. Unfortunately, he says, I need to decide fast due to the window for this drug, which is only a few hours. My mind starts and stops, unsteady as the rain. Like Dad, who lived to ninety-two, my aunt lives on her own. Unlike him, she’s not a talker. I have a hunch she is choosing not to talk. I can’t be sure. When does silence become a stroke? “Don’t give her the drug,” I say. Having lost Mom too early, I can’t bear the idea of giving her sister something that might quiet her completely. “That’s a good decision,” the neurosurgeon says. His words are kind, yet I’m certain he would’ve said this either way. I step outside the car and discover I’m not far from Dad’s grave. Here’s the flat stone of his marker, the dark-green plastic vase I fill with lavender hydrangeas from our yard. I long for his pragmatic advice, though all I hear is the wind in the cedars and words from the last years of his life, _Take care of your aunt_. Back in the car, I circle cemetery roundabouts to free myself of this place and its layers of fog. People with umbrellas and other drivers navigate slower than usual given the holiday, memories, and rain. Just before the cemetery gate, a seat belt warning beeps, steady as a hospital monitor. _C’mon, c’mon, c’mon._ Only a lightweight purse rests on the empty seat beside me. I click the seat belt to halt the sensor’s chiming. The shoulder strap across the soft gray covering looks like it’s holding a passenger. I drive into the not-knowing. The road is free of traffic blockages and lit by sunbreaks all the way to the hospital and to my aunt, who by the time I arrive will be talking just fine. * * * **Gail Folkins** often writes about her roots in the American West. She is author of the memoir _Light in the Trees_ , a 2016 Foreword Indies nature finalist, and _Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit_ , a 2007 Foreword Indies popular culture finalist. Her middle grade, horse-themed novel _Summer Farm_ is forthcoming with Trafalgar Square Books. Follow her on Instagram @gailfolkins and on her website. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 📱 edited by _****Hattie Fletcher****_; 🌧️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🌬️🌲 designed by _****Anna Hall****_; and 🚘 🏥 delivered to our 2,462 subscribers by _****Stephen Knezovich****_. ⚡ ****Flash February is in full swing**** , but it’s not too late. Join us here → ### **From the archive** Feb 12, 2025 **“Legacy”** by Katy Rank Lev | The lessons we pass on. Feb 14, 2024 **“Heart First”** by Janis La Couvée | L’amour. Explore the entire _Short Reads_ archive. * * * Full details here →

<p>I was about twelve the time my dad brought out his shredded jeans to try to impress me. It was his custody weekend, and we were in that apartment he rented in the gap between his first two marriages. My dad and I never knew what to make of each other. He was good with women, his hunting rifle, and his fists. I was his bookish only child, equally shy of girls and violence. </p><p>His face all grin and stubble, Dad described how, the previous weekend, a man had said something rude to a woman at the Cactus Club. Dad had leapt in to defend her honor, and they took it outside to the parking lot. After Dad finished whipping him, the guy stumbled to his truck and let his German shepherd out of the cab. The dog raced out to tear off Dad’s cowboy boot, pulling him down onto the icy asphalt each time he tried to stand.  </p><p>I cannot forget Dad dangling those jeans in front of me, one leg in tatters from knee to hem. I remember his laugh, my contempt hardening, as he described fighting to keep his pants on. I thought, <em>this is not something to brag about to your kid</em>. I threw a roundhouse, for myself, for my mom: “I would have been rooting for the dog.” </p><p>There was half a beat as he absorbed the punch of my voice. </p><p>It would not be until I was an adult that I’d wonder why the man would have taken his dog to the bar and I would doubt the story, as I have so many of Dad’s others. And only now, twenty years past his death, am I mature enough to admit to the fleck of admiration I felt when he replied through that unwavering grin, “But it wasn’t a fair fight, Son. The dog was sober.”  </p><hr /> <p><small>Raised in Arkansas, <strong>Bryan Bradford</strong> now lives in central New York with his wife and daughter. His enthusiasms include native plant gardening, scones, and whale watching. He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and his love for the good people of Minneapolis is boundless.   <br /><br />This essay is a <i>Short Reads</i> original. </small></p> <hr /><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-accent"><div class="kg-callout-text"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap">Help keep </strong></b><i><b><strong class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Short Reads</strong></b></i><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap"> going.</strong></b><br />Become a <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/support/" rel="noreferrer">supporting subscriber</a> or make a one-time <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/donate/" rel="noreferrer">donation</a>. </div></div><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-grey"><div class="kg-callout-text">Share this essay on: <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=I%20love%20this%20flash%20essay%20by%20Bryan%20Bradford%20via%20%40ShortReadsOrg.%20%0A%0Ahttps%3A//www.short-reads.org/roundhouse/" rel="noreferrer">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A//www.short-reads.org/roundhouse/" rel="noreferrer">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&amp;url=https%3A//www.short-reads.org/roundhouse/" rel="noreferrer">LinkedIn</a> | <a href="https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=I%20love%20this%20flash%20essay%20by%20Bryan%20Bradford%20via%20%40short-reads.org.%20%0A%0Ahttps%3A//www.short-reads.org/roundhouse/" rel="noreferrer">Bluesky</a></div></div><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-white"><div class="kg-callout-text">This issue of <i><em class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Short Reads</em></i> was 👨‍👦👖 edited by <a href="https://hattiefletcher.carrd.co/"><u><b><strong class="underline" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Hattie Fletcher</strong></b></u></a>; 🍺🌵 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🐕 🛻 designed by <a href="https://www.annabhall.com/"><u><b><strong class="underline" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Anna Hall</strong></b></u></a>; and 👊😏 delivered to our 2,439 subscribers by <a href="https://www.stephen-knezovich.com/"><u><b><strong class="underline" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Stephen Knezovich</strong></b></u></a>. <br /><br /> ⚡ <b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap">Flash February started Monday</strong></b>, but it’s not too late. <a href="https://flashfebruary.substack.com/" rel="noreferrer">Join us here →</a></div></div> <div style="text-align:center"> <h3 style="color:#E4663F"><strong>From the archive</strong></h3> <br /><small>Feb 5, 2025</small><br /> <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/the-thirty-eighth-parallel/"><strong>“The Thirty-Eighth Parallel”</strong></a> <br />by Robert Yune | Replaying history.<p></p> </div> <div style="text-align:center"> <small>Feb 7, 2024</small><br /> <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/dream-lover/"><strong>“Dream Lover”</strong></a> <br />by Rae Pagliarulo | A nice fantasy, while it lasted.<p></p> </div> <div style="text-align:center"><p> <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/page/2/">Explore the entire <i>Short Reads</i> archive.</a></p> </div><p></p> <hr /><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/2026/02/Flash_Feb_square.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="2000" height="2000" srcset="https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/size/w600/2026/02/Flash_Feb_square.jpg 600w, https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/size/w1000/2026/02/Flash_Feb_square.jpg 1000w, https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/size/w1600/2026/02/Flash_Feb_square.jpg 1600w, https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/2026/02/Flash_Feb_square.jpg 2000w" /><figcaption><a href="https://www.short-reads.org/flash-february/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Full details here →</span></a></figcaption></figure>

<p>When I caught a stomach virus this summer and was bedridden from the nausea, my husband researched remedies to steady the motion sickness swirling through my veins. He made a list and told me he would leave work early and stop by the store on his way home.  </p><p>He had his list, but I called and asked if he would please buy me chicken soup. <em>And saltines</em>, I added by text a few minutes later. </p><p>The last time I’d eaten a cracker was probably in my early twenties, before dieting turned into anorexia turned into treatment centers turned into <em>something I’ve just learned to manage</em>. I knew I wouldn’t eat the saltines, but I asked for them anyway. </p><p>At home, my husband unbagged Pepto-Bismol and Dramamine, a Gatorade, chicken soup, peppermint gum, and a large box of saltine crackers. He admitted he had needed to go back for the crackers: I’d sent my text after he had already paid and left the store and was sitting in his truck. My husband was there for the dieting and the anorexia and the treatment center. He knows it has been years since I’ve eaten any type of cracker. But he went back for the saltines anyway.  </p><p>I simmered the soup and left the saltines unopened. Then I rested my head against my husband’s shoulder, and he let me steady there; he let me stay there. </p><hr /> <p><small><strong>Mauri Pollard Johnson</strong> is an essayist, writing teacher, and amateur poet. She earned her MFA degree in Utah, where she lives with her husband. Just as much as she values writing, reading, and analyzing “highbrow” literature, she also values and enjoys watching reality dating shows, reading hockey romances, and listening to Taylor Swift.  Her work has appeared in <i>Phoebe</i>, <i>The Normal School</i>, <i>Silk Road Review</i>, <i>Under the Gum Tree</i>, <i>Punctuate</i>, and others.   <br /><br />This essay is a <i>Short Reads</i> original. </small></p> <hr /><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-accent"><div class="kg-callout-text"><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap">Help keep </strong></b><i><b><strong class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Short Reads</strong></b></i><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap"> going.</strong></b><br />Become a <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/support/" rel="noreferrer">supporting subscriber</a> or make a one-time <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/donate/" rel="noreferrer">donation</a>. </div></div><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-grey"><div class="kg-callout-text">Share this essay on: <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=I%20love%20this%20flash%20essay%20by%20Mauri%20Pollard%20Johnson%20via%20%40ShortReadsOrg.%20%0A%0Ahttps%3A//www.short-reads.org/and-saltines/">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A//www.short-reads.org/and-saltines/" rel="noreferrer">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&amp;url=https%3A//www.short-reads.org/and-saltines/" rel="noreferrer">LinkedIn</a> | <a href="https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=I%20love%20this%20flash%20essay%20by%20Mauri%20Pollard%20Johnson%20via%20%40short-reads.org.%20%0A%0Ahttps%3A//www.short-reads.org/and-saltines/" rel="noreferrer">Bluesky</a></div></div><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-white"><div class="kg-callout-text">This issue of <i><em class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Short Reads</em></i> was 🤢 💻 edited by <a href="https://hattiefletcher.carrd.co/"><u><b><strong class="underline" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Hattie Fletcher</strong></b></u></a>; 📱🏢 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🚗 ↪️ designed by <a href="https://www.annabhall.com/"><u><b><strong class="underline" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Anna Hall</strong></b></u></a>; and 🍲 😌 delivered to our 2,418 subscribers by <a href="https://www.stephen-knezovich.com/"><u><b><strong class="underline" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Stephen Knezovich</strong></b></u></a>. <br /><br /><b><strong style="white-space:pre-wrap">PS/</strong></b> We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/submissions/" rel="noreferrer">See the submission call →</a></div></div> <div style="text-align:center"> <h3 style="color:#E4663F"><strong>From the archive</strong></h3> <br /><small>Jan 29, 2025</small><br /> <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/charring-light/"><strong>“Charring Light”</strong></a> <br />by Karin Hedetniemi | Small joys.<p></p> </div> <div style="text-align:center"> <small>Jan 31, 2024</small><br /> <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/flinch/"><strong>“Flinch”</strong></a> <br />by Sonja Livingston | A game without winners.<p></p> </div> <div style="text-align:center"><p> <a href="https://www.short-reads.org/page/2/">Explore the entire <i>Short Reads</i> archive.</a></p> </div><p></p> <hr /><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/2026/01/Call-for-submissions_ppf2.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="2000" height="741" srcset="https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/Call-for-submissions_ppf2.jpg 600w, https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/size/w1000/2026/01/Call-for-submissions_ppf2.jpg 1000w, https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/size/w1600/2026/01/Call-for-submissions_ppf2.jpg 1600w, https://www.short-reads.org/content/images/size/w2400/2026/01/Call-for-submissions_ppf2.jpg 2400w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. </span><a href="https://www.short-reads.org/submissions/" rel="noreferrer"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Guidelines →</span></a></figcaption></figure>

by Amanda Fetters | Welcome to the neighborhood.

by Michele Peters | Circling.

by Hallie Pritts | Say yes to the mess.

by Jamie Etheridge | Wishes for a new year.

by Melinda Brasher | Thank you.

by Casey Mulligan Walsh | An abecedarium.

by Matthew Trumbull | You are here.

by Krista Lee Hanson | Watching.

by M. S. Reagan | Following the music.

by Beverley Stevens | Making a fuss.

by Button | Who would choose pain?

by Kristina Patterson | XOXO.

by Caylin Capra-Thomas | Redistributing energy.

by Jean Coco | Lost in time and space.