On the day that Christine Blasey Ford testified about being assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, we found Newton, our nineteen-year-old cat, cowering behind the toilet. Each time we reached for him, he recoiled.
My husband adopted Newton before he and I met. . .
I awake to the shrill of chickens, nature’s alarm clock. My two sisters, with whom I’m sharing a bedroom and two bare mattresses, retreat under their blankets like hermit crabs to their shells. Avoiding the hazy dawn that spills out of the window and into the room. . .
Crazy because ten years has gone by and still, I’m not as old as you were when we dated. Would you call what we did “dating”? I used to begin every story about us with “When I was 18, I dated my teacher,” but now I find myself saying, “We had a two-year relationship.” But even that word —“relationship”— it feels too— what?
There is an absence of what I have grown accustomed to: tension, uncertainty, fear. I am acutely aware of how, next to my Uncle, the world is a good place with good people and I am not something that has already been broken. I am eight-years-old and tired all the time. [. . .]
I am floating down an open, empty stretch of I-95, listening to the stock market crash, trying to figure out what I am doing—why I am going home—to take care of whom. It is the twelfth of March, and I have decided that I am coming back for my brother.[…]
This is not my story to tell. I was only a brief visitor to this land. Today, I read that the old town of Kashgar has been torn down and modernized. The Id Kah Mosque is closed to both visitors and worshippers. The city is rife with police checkpoints, and security cameras with facial recognition technology are installed at every street corner.[…]
What children of survivors add to the gift is a moral imperative of conveying knowledge; feelings of being dwarfed by the past; guilt at being alive; and kinship with other descendants.[…]
The white male body that exists and speaks—and shops and wears a mask (or doesn’t)—can also wield a gun, and kneel, and kill, as Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin proved when he crushed the life out of George Floyd.[…]
He ain’t my favorite person, she’d say, but he is your father. A simple truth he ignored, never once attempting to bridge the gap. Lived ten minutes away, worked even closer, but he was like a ghost, an apparition, someone we fabricated a connection with but who would ultimately vanish.[…]
As anyone who has ever heard a black comic perform or listened to a rap song knows, we don’t do
humblebragging. When you are the bomb, you simply say so.[…]
So, if I feel so alienated from gender, why should it be such a determining factor in who I would like? I can’t imagine making any woman who likes men happy. Wouldn’t we all be better off just liking everyone?[…]
My feelings didn’t shift, but my body did. I knelt beside you on our bed and brought your head to my shoulder. I repeated her message. But you already knew. You had seen my face change.[…]
The small FedEx box arrived in DC bearing an unlikely return address: Peter C. Hulsebosch III, Houston, TX. Surely this wasn’t from my brother, the brother who’d once told me he would never send a card, much less a gift, because then I’d get used to it […]
Simian Immunodeficiency Virus adapted to live in the body of a person, and then the window was pried
open: open to spread through the villages of Cameroon, and then the rest of Africa, and then the world
beyond, until it found its way to a club in the suburbs of New Orleans and into the lifeblood of the man
who lived next door, my uncle.[…]
I take solace in knowing how to make my father’s chicken adobo, because when he died in 2017, it was one of the many dishes he had made for us that wasn’t lost to us forever with his sudden passing[…]
During childhood I heard the stories about the shtetls and the pogroms that escalated to become the
Holocaust where 6 million Jews—two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe— were killed for no other
reason than for being Jewish.[…]
The hospital walls were stark white and we weren’t allowed to have pens: they were on the list of things we could potentially hurt ourselves with, alongside other items like shoelaces and earrings. I was thirteen and doodling with Crayola markers on construction paper. Even with the “non-toxic” declaration written on its label in the […]
In the middle of an IKEA showroom, I agonized over the transition between two sentences. I was wrestling with a second-grade assignment on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While I knew any seven-year-old could cobble together two statements about Dr. King, bridging together two thoughts about his achievements with one seamless transition proved to be […]
“Your mother’s your slave,” a girl in the playground taunted. “Is not!” I insisted, but even at six years old, I recognized the truth in her words. My mom pulled socks on my feet while I lay in bed to save me from the shock of cold tile, read to me in the bathroom when […]
Josef didn’t realize how little I thought about religion—how complete my lack of belief. “Are you religious?” I asked on one of our New York subway trips. I wonder now why I asked. I didn’t have the slightest premonition. I was making a joke, teasing, the way I might have said, “So, are you secretly […]
It was a cloudy September morning in San Francisco and my body had decided that everything inside of it was poison. It was 8:34 a.m. on a Thursday and I was hungover at work, sitting behind my desk praying that my breath smelled like coffee and not vomit. It wasn’t very often that I was […]
The February I am twenty-six, on the day before I’m supposed to fly to Portland to rent a house, I come down with the most brutal and short-lived flu I’ve ever had. My body aches so badly, I can’t move. When I say this, I don’t just mean that it hurts to move—I worry, when […]
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David DiNisco 
Photo credit: Iván Mera
Credit: Paige DePratter