Literary Nonfiction

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Assistant Editor Blessing Christopher: Preeti Talwai’s essay lands on the taste buds and ripens into an impactful narrative about time, family, displacement, and chronic illness. It further examines the thin line demarcating what is considered delicious/desirable from the things that are almost sickeningly sweet. Listen to Talwai read “Mango Season”: Mango Season The little patience …

Compact Jazz recording, 1989Nina Simone, accompanying herself on piano Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.—Gaston Bachelard In 1980, my mother lay dying. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was mourning—his marriage …

1 On the morning of December 24, 1979, a woman walking her dog near the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Boone, North Carolina, discovered my grandfather’s near-naked body lying in a ditch, one bullet in his head, nine bullets in his chest. He was sixty-eight; I was twelve. In the spring of the following year, on …

I needed money after the move. That was my excuse. But really I couldn’t bear to live in another house with it, knowing it was in the side table, in the drawer above my vibrator. Unfired for years—so much potential. The inheritance came with a small box of bullets, the cardboard foxed but nearly full, …

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A great many orchids, the endangered lady’s slipper for one, expend a portion of their energy creating pseudobulbs where they host ant colonies, because the formic acid ants spit at intruders gives the soil a pleasingly bitter pH. This is an example of myrmecophilia, a way of being in a love relationship with ants. Though …

This day ends in the kind of holiday where I feel knotted up in—remind me again who is the parasite and who the host? Hell-bind, strangleweed, beggarweed. A lot of people, no plants, no sky, in a small room where we tell each other how we are happy to be together. Hairweed, goldthread, devil’s-guts. A …