Short Nonfiction
Salamanders
They drowned her. That’s what David Attenborough told me in his kind old man, British, storybook way. They drowned her, and that’s just what happens to females sometimes during mating season.
Playlist: Hey Jude
Which is exactly the message your firstborn delivers in the cool blue gaze that sifts right through you: Not only are you not what you thought yourself to be; you are the very opposite of everything you thought you were.
Broken Home
Ten years after the divorce, my mother had saved enough to put a down payment on the turn-of-the-century farmhouse. It is a work in progress, but it is ours.
The Hours
The Hour Instructing the Boy / How to Show His Mother Love Without Hurting Her or / Damaging the Tubing that Sustains Her. The Hour of Grading Papers / Without (Really) Reading Them, then the Hour of Justifying / This is Just Fine This Once.
In the Valley of Dreams
My affair felt like the smaller transgression, a less-than sign as opposed to an equal to, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about on the side of the road with dust rising like spirits in the heat, fathers rising from the depths of memory.
Avalon
I know now what it means to be full to bursting with eager limbs, tears, and milk. I know, too, what it means to stretch something open with my own fullness by way of desire.
Inventory of a Love Addict
Now you have a delicate moth clawing its way up your hand. Beneath it, stone fruit, ripe. You think of Persephone. You wonder how much of love ends in transaction, an exchange.
Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy
Baking is precise and often pretty; cooking, more improvisational; I like them both and lose myself that way, which is a life skill and I recommend it.
Boots
For my own boots, I’d sit on the floor, pull and heave until my boots came off, contorting my legs in ways that tired adults could not, or would not.
Waiting
I think about my mother in the garden hilling green beans, and I asked her if I could go on birth control, and she didn’t say anything, which meant “yes,” which meant “no,” which meant, “I’m hilling beans right now.
Life Expectancy
In 1944, when my father was just a boy, his dog was sent away and my grandfather lied about it. Something about Sparky being “needed for the war” and special farms for training.
Sitting Quiet
That summer, our other brother stopped showering, and I began swallowing watermelon seeds so one would grow inside me
Boredom Interrupted
The flies struggle, but I persevere, and after what seems like forever, wings held tight against their bodies, the flies are sliding down the glass on streams of the liquid, like a fatal carnival ride.
Mamá Makes a Call to México
Again, mamá will parse what she can and pretend the voice soun ds the same as the voice in her memories across the border
The Hill Was Flat
I have never said to my own mother, I wish you lost me in a wild place, but it is true.
The G-Word
At every sleepover birthday party, we take turns lying on the shag rug, spread our fingers under Julie-Diana-Deanna’s head/shoulders/hips/arms/legs/feet, and recite little-girl mumbo jumbo, trying to levitate each other.
Composite Characters: Alice
“The first few years of my life were original, then I kept replaying the same scenes with new actors,” I said, trying to explain myself, to make some kind of amends.
1962: A Ghost Story
“Honey.” Her voice is still gentle. “A man can’t move into another man’s house.”
This Could Be Love
She drags me to each room, to each shadow: the witch, the devil, her own figure at the space where a closet meets the wall.
Wait for Me
I might spend five minutes yelling into the phone, "It's me, Mamina! Your Granddaughter!" And I will hear, "Who? Who?" And I'll try and try again to no avail and think she can't hear me anymore, she can't see me anymore.
My Condolences
The girl, whose name I never learned, didn’t die before the song was over, and we never saw her again.
Dream Journal
I’m a little girl with short hair again, but I can no longer slip back into the silent games she used to play.
News
No one talks of these fights later. No one talks of anything when my mother is around, and no one talks of her when she isn’t.
The Wasted Things
When I find the maggot-fetus on the floor of our shower, I feel intensely fearful that our skin is something that is almost all gone, almost all out;
Horizon
The snow is thick, alive and panting, a roaring wall of white in the space between my father and me.
Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret
Dragonflies can tell the real stars from glint on lake-surface. They fly to lesser suns, their wings open to duty, dipping to mire.
The Wind
Our parents rode in the enclosed cabin of our classic white Ford truck. They were talking but we couldn’t hear them. They never looked back to see us and we knew there was no room for us up in that sweetly, quiet cab.
Hazy Skies
Where I am living now, the seasons have no pivot... Springs are mercurial, senselessly violent in their cold and snow. I experience winter here like a death, wait endlessly for a green that will outgrow my grief.
Woman
I told her she was the perfect mom. This was when she tried to pull the tubes from her arms the gloves from her hands. One of the nurses said, “Oh, she’s a fighter.”
Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret
No one remembers her mother right or observes the rites to keep her whole. The woman becomes fragments, patches for quilts, and the daughter loses the needle, what North should have drawn from her hand and pinned where she could always find it.
+-
-
Ruminate Community
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________
The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.