Statement of Record

CategoryNarrative Non-Fiction

How to Do a Dead Bug

BY ABBY FRUCHT

H

Not the worst of all chauvinist prigs, I’ll concede, he seemed affronted by the wrongs my little handful of words and lines had done him, their very innocence, their youthfulness, rebuking him. The Pretty Child Can’t Write, She Shouldn’t, She Mustn’t, She Dare Not, She Will Not, The Skinny Co-ed Won’t Write, he seemed to pledge to himself as he drew forth my packet of fledgling verse and...

Excerpt from “Alfred Leaves His Heimat (The Native Land I Never Had)”

by Martin Jankowski

E

The past was officially over, and the present was a completely different story, or so they said. The revanchists were those old racist ethnopolulist speechifiers in West Germany, members of folkloristic landsmen’s clubs and leagues of expellees over there who liked to parade around in what he saw as a relentless gesture of political bluster toward the East.

Domači glasovi

by Andrea Scrima

D

I studied the explanations of astronomical quadrants and astrolabes and the armilla equinoziale, the armillary sphere of Santa Maria Novella, made up of two conjoined iron rings mounted on the façade that told the time of day and year based on the position of their elliptical shadow, when all at once it occurred to me that I’d wanted to write about something else altogether, about a...

Secrets, Discoveries: The Bank Building

by David Dario Winner

S

Nearly a century before Dorle’s death, twenty-odd years before she met her many lovers on ships and at parties, a mob of poor angry Jews from the Lower East Side who had lost their savings at her family’s bank surrounded their upper Manhattan apartment building and rioted. When I learned the bare outline of an essential family story that neither my parents nor I knew anything about, I screwed up...

Will It Ever End?

by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer

W

It is a disorienting time to be gay in the world, in America. Rainbows and “love is love” in one realm, vicious hate coming from another. Some of us celebrate Gay Uncles Day on Facebook while, for others, calling queer people child molesters is a winning electoral strategy. Some of our families love and accept us, and many of our marriages may soon be invalidated in the states...

As If We Lived There

By Bonnie Altucher

A

Tears were a sexual thing. The wet light brimming beneath her long lashes made Rachel’s eyes more beautiful. I wanted her to cry, to make her despair by just kissing her, whispering in her licked ear. I closed my eyes, let my mouth travel down her solid body, following unreeling shapes in my mind, like the primitive landscapes on a radarscope.

Appendix (excerpt)

By Tyler C. Gore

A

Now, I don’t want to get carried away. Pay attention, kids. Some parental fears really are based in the empirical universe. You really shouldn’t run with scissors, or climb into unmarked vans driven by strangers, and acute appendicitis really is more likely to occur in children than adults, and that is exactly why whenever you had a pain in your side...

Living Between Two Worlds

L

by Cheryl Pearl Sucher

It was the middle of January and my Kiwi husband and I were packing for our annual holiday to our other home in New Zealand. The Covid-19 virus was wreaking havoc in Wuhan, China but seemed confined to that Asian province. However, in the short time between preparing to leave and the actual date of our departure, January 28, Wuhan was cut off from the world as...

We Are Dreaming of the Future Season

W

By Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer

J and K, the owners of the house, come out to greet us when we pull into the driveway. They live next door in another house mostly hidden by trees. J, a big man in jeans and suspenders, keeps at least ten feet from us. K hovers another ten feet or so farther back. With her straight grey bob, she doesn’t exactly remind me of my mother but she...

Statement of Record

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