Nonfiction

In the late 1800s, there were over one hundred thousand nesting pairs of American bald eagles. By 1970, there were only four hundred nesting pairs. In 1978, eagles were put on the endangered species list. In 2007, they were removed. Sometimes, we know how to fix things. In 2019, a pair of bald eagles made …

Winner of the 2025 Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award Button’s work has found homes in The New York Times, Longreads, HuffPost, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, among others. She explores the complications of love, mental illness, and letting go. Her fiction and non-fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appeared in several anthologies and Modern Love …

The miserable task is called cold trailing. Our entire fire crew is lined out on our hands and knees crawling across the burned out remains of the forest checking for signs and symptoms of heat. It’s near the end of our 14-day roll and we’re exhausted. We’ve been digging line, lighting backfires, and cutting brush …

For three days we existed Elsewhere. A gap in the universe opened up and sucked us in, to another plane, another dimension, a new milky way made with brighter stars splashed like dairy on a black sky. Everything was heightened in Elsewhere. Colors more saturated, sounds crisper and cleaner, smells somehow more precise. Taste and …

1982, Beirut, Lebanon. I am fourteen. School, some friends, a nice house facing the sea. My father is visiting from Dammam, Saudi Arabia, where he has been working since the mid-seventies. He visits two or three times a year. I am happy. When he is home, almost nothing can go wrong. Even war seems to …

The linguistics professor calls him “Pingüino,” but you don’t know why. Maybe it’s how he wears black cargo pants splotched in white paint. How he saunters into class late each morning with a perfect smile across his wide face. Maybe it’s his slow way of talking, and his eyes that are always looking farther than …

I used to grit my teeth—out of habit. By the end of the day my jaw would hurt. At night I wore a mouthguard around the house same as the kids wear for ice hockey, to remind me not to clench and grind. My wife wondered if it had to do with repressed anger—grinding my …

A position opened at a new nursery in town, so I applied, eager to apply my burgeoning succulent and mulching knowledge, knowing my retail experience was limited to a few months behind a dry cleaner’s counter, counting on this opportunity to rescue me from a life working maintenance at a chemical plant. The interview went …

Twenty-five years ago, I found out my friend, Luis “Louie” Rodriguez, came home to Rhode Island to die. Louie had AIDS. He knew the day was dawning. He didn’t want any of his friends to see him die. I didn’t get the chance to see him, to say goodbye, tell him how much I love him, …

Today, while I was on the gate, I watched Cheba’s dead body being carted past the cell I lock in.[i] He was distinguished only by a look on his face as if he were breaking the seal on a tough bowel movement. If it hadn’t been for the Sergeant yelling “what’s the time,” I wouldn’t …