I was in the room the day my mom found out she had cancer. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been, but I’m not sure if I would have believed it…
cancer
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Turned to Gold Before My Eyes
by Guest Contributor January 7, 2021Image Credit: Tom Cowton. Fuchsia bush growing in Torres del Paine National Park, Chile circa 2004. I was 13 the first time my mother threatened to kick me out of…
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This Precious Thing
by Guest Contributor November 20, 2020A woman who changes her hair is about to change her life. — Coco Chanel My hair started to fall out strand by strand instead of in the large, dramatic…
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The Birds: Mother Hen
by Guest Contributor August 27, 2020One spring afternoon in 1992, my mother and I went to the pet store to buy birdseed and walked out with four baby chicks. Whenever our family acquired a new…
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Mix for Sarah
by Guest Contributor August 18, 2020The weird thing about getting older is how people stumble into my life whom I haven’t seen in years, it’s a time loop, someone whose whereabouts were unknown, and then…
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The Birds: The Hurl and Gliding
by Guest Contributor March 25, 2020I like the modesty of the display cases; their white frames arranged like paragraphs on the wall. Within each, a bird or a group of birds, mounted against a light…
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The Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Power of Narrative and Community Amid Chaos
by Guest Contributor January 24, 2020There is no good way to open this. I can only try to make sense of the summer of 2017 when my mother lost her mind and the country seemed…
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Auto Body
by Guest Contributor October 29, 2019Parents Who Work, a System That Doesn’t Giancarlo, the smog guy, always struck me as remarkably good-natured for someone who worked in a fume-filled shoebox all day. When I’d…
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WOVEN: A Self that Doesn’t Stay on Brand
by Guest Contributor September 18, 2019WOVEN is an Entropy series and dedicated safe space for essays by persons who engage with #MeToo, sexual assault and harassment, and #DomesticViolence, as well as their intersections with mental…
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Plans
by Guest Contributor August 20, 2019When I was ten, and my sister, Eunice, was eleven, we made a suicide pact. With a rusty hacksaw we snitched from my father’s workbench; we huddled on the wooden…
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Telling
by Guest Contributor July 12, 2019Image Credit: Dev Murphy My mother called me last week to tell me she had dreamed of her sister Christy’s trip to the hospital before it happened. Minor illness.…
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Leukaemia Travelogue
by Guest Contributor July 5, 2019A third eye for sensing danger has planted itself at the base of my skull. It sends out a dull throb when the possibility of bodily harm is perceived. It’s…
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Hold Your Breath
by Guest Contributor May 31, 2019Image Credit: Bailey Pennington In that very moment—hearing the doctor strip his hands free of the latex gloves he had just used in the examination room—my worst nightmare was…
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The Birds: Bird Math
by Guest Contributor April 30, 2019* * * Come sit and empty your pockets, child, and let us count what we’ve got. We can sort it this way: for me, love counts. And cancer counts.…