The Diptych as Short-Form Memoir
In the Middle Ages, devotional paintings rendered on two hinged wooden panels—known as diptychs—were used to depict religious scenes for meditation and contemplation. Portraits of Madonna and Child were common, as well as important biblical stories, like the Virgin birth or Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion. Many diptychs were created on a small scale so they...
Too Soon
Summer ends too soon this year as all the seasons do. Funny, how after sixty-eight summers, time, the thing there always seemed so much of, collapses in on itself, and I find myself counting out the number of summers until an end. And someone, a woman friend I knew a long time ago, and always...
Duplex
The person on my voicemail was a man. His voice was high, higher than most men’s voices I’d heard before, and he spoke slowly, as if reading off of cue cards. I didn’t know when the call came in. My cell phone never rang. Rather, in that late morning, the phone vibrated, informing me of...
Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages
Stage 1: Fear The old highway to San Vicente is nothing more than a dirt road. At the height of the dry season the landscape is leached of color, the road pale as bone. We bump in and out of potholes, my American advisor filling the Peugeot with 400 years of Costa Rican history: the...
Not Like You
I’m memorizing a license plate number, which I glimpsed when he grabbed me by my ponytail, punched me, and dragged me into his truck. I repeat it silently, obsessively. NLU-285. Parked in the woods, dozens of miles from the lights of Portland, the midnight air is thick, damp, barely cool. I smell pine trees, clean...
In Case of Emergency
In her left hand she holds the vase he made her, heavy and cool. His initials are carved in the bottom, deep ridges made of the familiar initials in the painfully recognizable handwriting. They were there before he proposed, and they still endure even after he dumped her. There’s a hammer in her other hand,...
Hill Street Blues
My first memory fails me. Brown shag carpet. I am in the living room. My mother is watching the end of Hill Street Blues on a color television. She lights a cigarette. Smoke rises, spiraling toward the ceiling. When her show is over, an orange racecar with a Confederate flag painted over the top jumps...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")