Good Salt In an episode of the British TV series Foyle’s War, a plastic surgeon treats soldiers’ burn wounds by bathing them in salt water, having found that badly burned pilots who had landed in sea water recovered more quickly than burn victims on land.… Read More “Salt is Salt by Alice Lowe”

A caesarean section cuts through seven layers of skin, muscle, and tissue.… Read More “Body Rubble by Lauren Grant”

It was September 7, 2022, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the double homicide of my older brother Joe and his two-year-old daughter Jeanne in Anchorage, Alaska.… Read More “ARCTIC RIFFS by Monica Woo”

To rouse the kids, I raise their shades and if I have it in me, I sing a line or two of their old nursing song, a country song from my own childhood, to soften the crash of the slumbers I’ve ruined.… Read More “I MAKE COFFEE, I MAKE FIRE by Jessica Pulver”

Hi Dad.… Read More “A FORK IN THE ROAD by Karen Travis”

Karaganda, Kazakhstan From memoir A Soviet Union of the Mind The 1996 Lonely Planet guidebook entry on Karaganda begins, “No-one comes to Karaganda who doesn’t have to.”… Read More “SCALPING THE BALD MAN by Harry Leeds”

That’s what my mom proclaimed to me, my younger sister, and my dad after she had unwrapped the three-hundred and forty-third turtle knickknack given to her over the course of years for Christmases, birthdays, and other occasions.… Read More “NO MORE TURTLES by Marianne Cotugno”

Go under the bed.… Read More “HOW TO SURVIVE THIRD GRADE SUMMER by Christi Krug”

Light floating through our kitchen window transforms his fiery red hair to golden, angelic.… Read More “DAD, DON’T by Cynthia Graae”

I imagined the seventh grader resting her left foot on her right knee, pressing the marker firmly to decorate the shoe.… Read More “THE SHOE by Mary Jumbelic”

He chose the café—a raspberry red one known for light, fluffy pastries filled with heavenly creams.… Read More “DALLOYAU CAFE, 5ème ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS by Dawn-Michelle Baude”

When my father told me that a mid-morning fusion of breakfast and lunch was called brunch, I thought he’d made the word up.… Read More “PORTMANTEAU by Alice Lowe”

It wasn’t just any washer.… Read More “THE WASHER by Karen Storm”

If you met me, you wouldn’t think I’m the sort to own a Cartier watch.… Read More “MY CARTIER WATCH by J Brooke”

Pee trickled down my leg as I stood on tiptoe, gripping my shaking palms to the oars of our 14-foot inflatable raft, and tried to get a glimpse of Snowhole, a rapid named for an enormous boulder on the right side of the river that lifts the water up and then drops it into a billowing white cloud of chaos called a hole.… Read More “A TURN AT THE OARS by Heidi Lasher”

We just need to figure it out.… Read More “MIGUEL by Kyle Seibel”

“Slow down!… Read More “OF CLIMATE AND CULTURE AT PORKY PIG DINER by Judith Szerdahelyi”

I will say soup over eighty times in this essay.… Read More “AN APOLOGIA FOR SOUP by William Lehman”

The first time I remember being proud of my father was in third grade.… Read More “Does Iron Occurrence in Ground Water Correlate with Dissolved Oxygen? by Richie Smith”

The tiny village of Siřem is located 78 km northwest of Prague.… Read More “Franz among the Animals by Elana Wolff”