I can’t stop looking at you. You look like you do on the cross; but there’s no cross. It’s just you. You’re floating, arms spread out, reaching for the walls. There are holes in your hands but you’re smiling.
“Matthew Sweeney,” Father Bill calls from the front of the church, where he sits beneath your statue.
We always played before dinner, around 5 p.m. when it was not so hot and the black asphalt had cooled from the summer sun. Our feet could tolerate it and we went barefoot, calloused and dirty. We have the same feet, thick skinned under the heel and ball, similarity under the toes.
…We have dubbed him “radio dictator” for his insistence on having the radio permanently tuned to the local Oldies station. Yet, the music, which should provide a bouncy soundtrack for our family vacation, pushes me into treacherous territory—the gap between what I once thought my romantic life would be and what it has become.
What a pair. Double D’s. Poking up at me like twin peaks. Pam Anderson, eat your heart out.
Too bad they’re attached to a fourteen-year-old boy.
It’s hard to believe we’re on our fourth issue! It’s been eight months since we launched our website and, soon, we’ll be a year old! Well, we won’t rush that. One issue at a time…
I am amused by the chattering of my new classmates. The way they speak seems so precise, so different and so harsh. American English, I think, is weird. Chinese is so much better.
I was fourteen, and the rose was perfect. I’d engineered an equally perfect plan for the major opportunity my freshman-year Sadie Hawkins dance presented: one of the most admired girls in class had asked me—me?— to go with her. Over MySpace, sure, and we hardly spoke
Hippocampus Magazine is growing its (volunteer) staff. If you love creative nonfiction and have some time to devote to this new, online literary magazine, consider joining our team. We can’t pay you. But, we will shower you with much affection and appreciation, something even the guys and gals who make the big bucks don’t often…
Hippocampus Magazine is proud to announce our guest judges for the Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction. Our four judges bring with them to this competition more than a century of collective literary and publishing experience spanning genres and professions.
When I open the envelope containing a notice from the Diocese of Oakland that my EX of several years has petitioned for a Declaration of Invalidity, my first reaction is to laugh and toss the paperwork into the recycling bin. But the words toll like solemn bells throughout the day. Ecclesitasticum, Ajudication, Decree of Constitution. In the grip of the language as I had been some twenty years ago when I made the mistake of converting to Catholicism, I retrieve the paperwork.
