family

You sit up straight in the hard plastic chairs in the cold conference room waiting to meet your potential new foster daughter, absently rubbing your knuckles raw with your thumb.…

On a bright Wednesday morning in March, we leave for daycare and work because that is what we do, even when we’ve spent the evening in Trauma One of Children’s…

Image 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…

My girlfriend and I were walking back to my place from Target, whose red, illuminated sign had become my new moon, when I saw the Dumpster sitting behind the Cineplex…

Image Credit: Daiga Ellaby    Before we met in person, we talked on the telephone, matching alto timbres warm in our ears. This was decades before you could spit in a…

There are so many ways to tell a story about desperation, and I have considered them all. I keep coming back to the same dark room in an eighth-floor Chicago…

Although you have never been to Iceland and have no immediate plans to visit, you’ve recently decided that it is in your best interest to learn to speak Icelandic. The…

Image Credit: Kiernan Lofland     . . . to become white in the South is to absorb some large part of its particular iteration of the U.S. racial hierarchy.…

1. “I don’t know if things happen for a reason,” my dad says in a low aside to my boyfriend in the pizza parlor in Grand Forks, North Dakota. “I…

Image Credit: B Hayward   Not long after we moved in together, my girlfriend and I created a budget to monitor our living expenses. We both freelance, so it’s a…

The pig, Swine, an animal unfit for consumption by many, deemed unclean. An animal that can be utilized head to tail—as with the fine art of charcuterie. To take a…

The Day   When we pulled in the campground owner was waiting for us in a pick-up truck that had seen better days. We’d called early asking for firewood. Rolling…

1 I first learned the term “Ignorance is bliss” from my mom. She told me about how her brother Vincent was hyper, constantly fidgeting. And he was always smiling. Their…

I didn’t see the physical mess: I smelled it. A noxious odor—a potion of blood and paint fit for the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Earlier that day, my brother…