You are at a frat party in Michigan—your first and only. Your cousin invited you to see the snow sculptures the houses erect every winter, mythical beasts glistening under clear February sky.
His frat is one of those academic, no-secrets-no-hazing ones, and you watch them sing (silly song title) as they gather behind the basement bar, arms around each other… You have recently started trusting men again …
Read the FULL ESSAY here in MAD LIB format.
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Hayli May Cox is a PhD candidate studying Creative Writing and Gender Studies at The University of Missouri, though she’s really a Michigander. Her stories and essays have found homes in places such as DIAGRAM, Hippocampus Magazine, Sundog Lit, New Delta Review, and others. In her free time, Hayli paints, builds Lego worlds, and hikes around with a backpack full of field guides.
3 comments
Tony Elston says:
Feb 20, 2023
Very original. Very clever. Thank you.
Jennifer Eden says:
Mar 20, 2023
This is the story for so many women and the Mad Libs format really drives that home for me by allowing the insertion of personal details rather than describing the author’s exact experience. Such a creative and well-written piece.
Alaina Smith says:
Mar 24, 2023
This essay was so well composed; it’s powerful, evocative, original. The format that allows for the insertion of words does help to make the story more universal (insert your own experience), and it lets the author and the reader consider the different ways this might have gone down—but what stood out to me was something else: The format gives the author distance from what really happened to her, allowing certain details to go unnamed, to serve as a shield and a deception, so we all can pretend the verbs and adjectives and nouns that we fear might be accurate aren’t the right ones. Yet even from a distance, we see. Amazing piece.