Crosswords
My mother loved crossword puzzles, spending hours, sometimes, until she managed to work out the answers to clues like “bright colored aquarium fish” and “English composer, Frederick.” “Danio,” she’d finally fill in, and “Delius,” and for a day or two she’d leave the large Sunday newspaper puzzle face up on the end table by the...
“Icky Papa Died”
I was relieved when my great-grandfather died. I learned of the event more than a year after the fact, simultaneously ingesting the information that he’d passed in Idaho, that he’d been buried in Montana, and that his grave—while next to my great-grandmother’s—was unmarked and expected to remain that way. No one in Idaho wanted him...
The Crab in the Stars
I am home alone—sort of. I am almost twelve, and I am unsupervised. My parents have gone shopping. My brother is at a friend’s. It’s just me and my grandparents, who live in an apartment attached to our house. My grandfather is sick. He has been for a year. For a few weeks now he...
Three Graces
In the Sunflower Café the waitresses sat down in booths with elderly customers and watched them shuffle photos of grandkids like decks of cards, as if looking for a good hand. Some early retirees—robust, tanned, and laughing — described the waitresses to me as “booze hags.” The women’s hands shook as they poured coffee. They...
Circling
Daffiama, Ghana I.There was a woman who died while I was in Daffiama; she was young and eight months pregnant. I didn’t go to the funeral, but those who did said you could see the baby circling around inside of her, like a hand moving under a sheet. Later I felt bad that I hadn’t...
Holes
I fell so hard and so fast that I didn’t know I had fallen until I started crawling out. — Heidi Skurat Harris, “Buried in Polyester” When the doctor said, “bone marrow biopsy,” my mom and I didn’t make eye contact. My feet stopped tapping on the white, blue, and salmon speckled tiles, my breath...
1000 Somali Shillings
The 1000 Somali shilling note is laminated to protect its colors, a mixture of orange, purple, tan, and green, from fading. On one side, women weave baskets; their images are purple, and the baskets around them are orange. Some of them seem to be full, perhaps with food. On the opposite side of the note...
How to Say Goodbye in Front of 14 Strangers
So this is it, I think, sitting on the floor near the first floor nurses’ station at Slidell Memorial Hospital, holding the payphone, talking to my best friend, Joyce, who has been crying all day because they made an announcement over the PA system during third period that the Mesman family needed her prayers. “They...
Mineral Spirits
We pushed up mounds in the ground where we would have been, the dirt a darker gray for being turned. Three boy graves under three boy-made grave crosses, all of us in short sleeves waiting beneath a flat white sky shot through by water oaks. Me, my brother, Kirk, our cousin, Jason. This was back...
Bridge Bum Buddha
My first lover (although I use the word loosely) was an older man, twice my age of 15, a lapsed law student with violet eyes and kohl-black lashes, and a bridge bum, not the kind who sleeps on railroad embankments, but one of the obsessed who sits at a table all day and night, holding...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")