Up north
Richard Bentley Amherst, Massachusets Lake Michigan. Photo by Qfamily on Flickr. July 15, 2006. CC BY 2.0. He had come to Northern Michigan, and the lake gulls were shrieking at him. He had been on vacation only two days, but he sat around the cabin, springing up now and then to go to the […]
How to save a life
Sam Campbell Moh’D Ibrahim Johnson City, TN, USA “We had been happy together, though it took years to convince her family to allow us to marry.” My wife is in Texas, threatening to file divorce papers. I am here, 996 miles away, trying to find Mrs. Smith who has wandered out of her room […]
A form of pain
Ifediba Nzube Port Harcourt, Nigeria Èsù the trickster by Onyeji Prince. For Yewande, pain is Èsù slapping her head like a bata drum. But no one sees that; they see only a tumor pushing out her left eye, up her palate, and through her nostrils. Most days she smells like meat gone green. The […]
Tuesday: social admit
Rebecca Slotkin New Haven, Connecticut, USA “Unraveling” by Ron Slotkin. Used with permission. We have a routine, Dad and I. I wake up first, turn on NPR and brew our coffee. My clamor tells Dad it is morning. This used to be my pre-work ritual before Dad started to get lost — first around […]
Three doctor’s visits
Zara Aziz Bristol, England The Cathedral by Auguste Rodin. 1908. Musée Rodin. Photograph by Daniel Stockman. 2010. CC BY-SA 2.0. Only one week ago Yasmin had been at the same flats to see her patient, Jenny Johnson. Jenny was a lovely lady of around fifty-two, with a lilting Irish accent and a penchant for […]
Chemo Room
Sarah Smith Pike Road, Alabama, USA Chemotherapy iv. National Cancer Institute. Photo Credit: Linda Bartlett Cancer makes me glad I am fat. Mr. Weiss, two chairs down from Jack and me today, does not agree. Two months ago, Mr. Weiss tried to convince me of the importance of keeping in shape and maintaining a healthy weight. […]
Jacarandas- a dream
In the year when the Olympic Games were held in Australia, the Jacarandas were in full bloom and their blue blossoms wafted through the air. At the Olympic campus an English boy and an Australian girl fell in love. Every night they would be seen walking through the cool air holding hands. Sometimes they went […]
Butterfly day
Marsal Sanches Bismarck, North Dakota, USA In some cultures, black butterflies are considered omens of death. He did not believe that a black butterfly was an omen of death. It was just some old superstition he remembered hearing from his Brazilian babysitter many years before, sort of a South American banshee. Someone would see […]
She was even in love with you
Stewart Massad St. Louis, Missouri, USA Cognitive Dissonance: Gratitude in oncology Francis Delisle was coming out of Bard’s TrueValue Hardware with ant bait in a paper bag when he saw Marty Van Etten coming up Main Street. Marty’s wife Anne had died at winter’s end, only forty-seven, from glioblastoma, after surgery in Baltimore, radiation in […]
Percy’s last day
Shampa Sinha Tasmania, Australia McIndoe operating at East Grinstead by Anna Zinkeisen, 1944. Percy missed his regular train that morning, the one that would have given him a comfortable half-hour cushion between his arrival at the station and “knife-to-skin” time at the operating theatre. He felt his anxiety levels rising within him like bile […]