Nonfiction

Winner of the 2022 “Annie Dillard Award” in Nonfiction In 1995, Byron Kim, a Brooklyn based contemporary artist, attempted to paint his childhood home when he realized he could not recall its exact color. He knew it was pink, but he couldn’t remember if the house was the color of a tongue or the pale …

The summer I first remember the salps arriving, I was eleven.  The sea grew thick with them. Overnight, illuminated by ripples of phosphorescence, the tide had pulled and spread the clear bodies along the Long Island coast. Jelly sacks the size of dimes, the waves piled them on the shore. I found them the next …

The man at the window is my father. He has lost most of his sight and suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. His vision drifts and spins, the wind blowing light across the yard of his house on Blackhawk Street. All day he sits in his chair looking out, seeing cats and Cadillacs, rabbits with mittens, a child with red hair, weary soldiers standing in a circle smoking. All are born of light, all a blur of energy and memory. Something green is swallowing something white, a boat perhaps on stormy Pine Lake.

In 2019, scientists at the New England Aquarium in Boston published a paper on chronic illness in whales by studying and measuring the stress hormones left behind on baleen plates. While I lack a push-broom mouth for filter-feeding, my teeth show the wreckage of the neglect and trauma I endured as a child. My CPTSD is well medicated, but still: so much stress, a lifetime of fighting. Research clearly shows that children who grow up with chronic abuse are more likely to develop chronic health problems as adults. After years of reading about trauma, I have finally aged into the statistic I’ve been destined for since childhood.

Most surprising of all were your hands; they never carried a fleck of dirt or dust. Your fingernails might have been painted by da Vinci, and when you curled your hand around a cup, your index finger protruded over the top like a blue heron down on her fishing-luck, but still wavering there over the liquid.

It’s a myth our nails keep growing after we die. I remember my mother’s final manicure, a hot pink gel that didn’t even chip when she fell on her concrete porch, still looked perfect a week later when we laid her in her coffin.  At the hospital, nobody told us she was dying.

Before the employee at the Museum of Shadows lets me touch the haunted doll, she makes me put on a pair of black gloves. She says it’s for my protection, that the spirit in the doll might try attaching to me. I hold the aging boy in a sailor suit, talking to him quietly, rocking him up and down slightly to watch his obedient eyelids close and open, close and open with each soft murmur.

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery Dig Site  ~ San Miguel, California, 1991 What I find: a tiny wooden horse, smooth from where blade whittled wood, legs delicate as matchsticks. A golden stamp, slick replica of the ones my mother lets me lick. A tiny silver spoon with an engraving of New York State to hold in …

The Japanese fished my grandfather from the ocean. An unwanted catch, part of a shoal of broken men. Barefoot and barely dressed, they were forced to march through the streets of Macassar. Burning tarmac blistered their feet, the sun stripped salt-stained skin from their shoulders.

I pick all the raspberries. A ritual now, I fill the bowl. I waste a few while pulling, wait for their stains on my hands. This is unguided presence and meditation, a keeping myself, on my knees in the bush reaching for the ripe and grown. I’m getting the metaphor out early —- the hanging …