My Craving Body

It is 10:34 p.m. I am journaling about the difference between what I eat and how I taste it.

In other words, it’s not about the chocolate cake. It’s about the pool of saliva swirling through each bite. It’s about the tongue pressing crumb into ganache, the esophagus readying itself to carry each sweet offering down. It is about my body knowing it is safe. Safe to sit, to enjoy, to receive.

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Space

The key, newly cut, fit awkwardly in the lock. I jiggled it, turning it upside down and right side up again, but the door wouldn’t budge. The superstitious part of me wondered: Is this a sign? Am I making a mistake?

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Molly Stites Comment
Hairpiece

In the summer of 1982, I come home to Edinburgh from university wearing Doc Martens a size too small, thick black eyeliner and my boyfriend’s coat. I spend the week’s wages from my holiday job in a second-hand bookshop getting a bright red streak put in my hair. I strut home from the hairdresser feeling like Chrissie Hynde’s sister. When I open the front door, Dad is waiting for me in the hall. 

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Julia Nusbaum Comment
An Acquaintance

My friend Marianne died last week. We met through a writers' group that started through the local public library and continued on Zoom during the pandemic. In the beginning, the group was fluid, writers, coming and going, sometimes for weeks, sometimes longer, usually without explanation.  But  in time, the regulars emerged, with a few of the original members as the bedrock. Marianne was one of those.

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How I Found Out I Was Raped

I read an article in our local newspaper about a high school coach who had just been fired for abusing his male students. I was in my early forties, and remember taking in the article (yes, back in the day when people still read an actual newspaper) and contemplating the unpleasant information that a football coach in a city just north of where I lived had inappropriately touched his male students. My next thought was, Oh, that happened to me.

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Channeling Rena in the H&M Dressing Room

One Sunday in January, my twelve year-old and I had an hour between appointments in the Denver suburbs, and found ourselves at a mall. In the age of “add to cart,” we rarely shopped together, and she had grown so much in the previous several months that none of her clothes fit. As we wandered into H&M, my daughter’s eyes lit up. She grabbed armfuls of clothes, including a pair of acid washed jeans with a chain that went from the front pocket to a back belt loop, each link a tiny heart. Maybe they won’t fit, I thought hopefully, as I trailed behind her in a daze. The Friday before, she had refused to go to school, her second school of the year, and one that had seemed promising only a couple of weeks before. I felt like I was hiking along the edge of a cliff in the fog; I had no idea what was going to happen, or how close we were to the edge.

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Spontaneous Combustion

The edges blur and hum around me. Life is continuing. But I’m stuck. Frozen. Back here again. In this familiar place that I didn’t choose to revisit. The seat still feels warm. The past floods back. I thought I’d left it in my wake. Moved on. The tentacles are never far-threatening to lure me back in and swallow me up. I look down at my stomach. It’s grown a little.

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Julia NusbaumComment
Sorry for Your Loss

I lost my mother on Christmas Eve. Colored lights twinkled up and down the block as I arrived but her window was dark. A pile of mail in the hall. Television on, cold coffee in her mug. The radiator banging away. The tree was half trimmed and the cats were prowling around the apartment crying, unfed. Overflowing ashtray. Cat
toys and dust balls, empty bottles of bourbon.

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Kicking Through the Quiet

I remember the backyard of our house by the Intercoastal Waterway, the way the marsh smelled in the late afternoon, salty and a little sweet. My brother and I spent hours there, running around with our dog, who always sprinted in wide circles, barking at nothing in particular. I’d sit on the old swing that hung from the tall tree, feeling the wind as I kicked my legs higher and higher. From the top of the swing’s arc, I could see the water sparkling in the distance, the sun sinking lower, casting everything in a golden light. The marsh grass swayed in the breeze, and I felt a sense of calm, like the world paused for a moment.

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The Hospital Vacation

My mother used to tell me, “Marry a man who’s thin. It means he’s a hard worker.” As she predicted, my husband turned out to be a lot like my father. Not only were they both thin, and coincidentally hard workers, they were equally tough. My own prediction was that their thick skin was birthed from the hearty leather of bulls slaughtered by their own swords in past lives. Men like them have been around before, perhaps returned to this earth to learn a new lesson. Perhaps to walk the earth in softer-soled shoes.

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Fun While Pregnant?

I was standing in a long grocery check-out line. Snap! I felt the elastic on my silky red underpants break. I slapped my thighs together hoping to prevent a downfall. However, as customers advanced toward the counter, I had to move ahead. With each step, the panties slid lower, over the precipice of my bulging stomach with a straight descent to my knees. Another step forward and the offending garment plummeted around my ankles. I did not look to the right or left or behind me where other shoppers stood waiting. I attempted to look nonchalant as I stepped out of my panties and stuffed them into my huge purse.

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Selena RaygozaComment
Shaky Madam

Life in a small mountain town means it’s not unusual to be recognized. But to hear my name when dressed up in an ostentatious ruby dress and black fishnet stockings, a magenta-and-bubblegum-pink-boa draped across my back and over my elbows, a cerise silk ribbon tied around my throat and vermilion lipstick—to look nothing like myself, yet stand out in kodachromatic vividity whilst hearing my name was abnormal.

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