Nonfiction

The barefoot children stand on cracked clay they call the back yard. Hard dirt and weeds, some old car tires cover rattlesnake holes. All three are almost in kindergarten, standing in grass up their collarbones. They stand behind the chain-length fence, holding their microwaved dinners as they exchange breath with the next-door neighbor’s attack dogs. …

There is just enough snow on the smaller neighborhood roads that my studded tires don’t make a noise. I turn down the music to roll silently, holding my body still and open, like an eye. I always catch myself staring. This is one of the few silences in my life. I glide, silently, past the …

We are laughing too much for the chemotherapy infusion room, which is inappropriate, we know, obnoxious even, but we’ve lost control of the thing and are now heaving and crying and gasping for air and when you wipe your eyes, you accidentally wipe off part of an eyebrow and I point this out, which means …

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 …