Literary Nonfiction

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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 …

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My mother’s village is about an hour’s drive south from Beirut. The route starts on the coast, the sea to the right, vast, blue, and sparkling in the sun. Beyond the army checkpoint in Sidon, smaller roads east and farther south wind through busy villages lined by short concrete buildings with storefronts on the ground …

Story from Issue 22.1

The train curved around the mountains of West Virginia, and my father said to look out the window. He pointed to our right, and I saw the engine. Then he pointed to his left, and I saw the red caboose. “We’re one big circle,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re coming or going. If …