I certainly never forgot the scene Nathan Evans painted in his essay, Vaseline.
This past winter, about the time I first read the submission, I couldn’t even lubricate my lips with the petroleum-jelly-like goo that squeezed out of my yellow Carmex tube without giggling as I imagined poor Eleanor waking up with that odd sensation between her cheeks (Yes. Those cheeks.)
Yesterday, our launch day, was absolutely amazing. A big thank you to all who visited our new magazine, commented, tweeted, shared and liked. I can already see that a wonderfully supportive creative nonfiction community is being created.
One of the most unfortunate things about life is that often, the Venn diagram showing the people we are attracted to and the people who are attracted to us simply resembles a circle waving desperately at a much smaller circle across a yawning divide. And the smaller circle is usually full of freaks.
I tell her I have just two memories of childhood: the night my father died and the day our house burned in a fire. I am seeking to remember something else, anything else, from my life before I was eleven.
It’s a crisp, cold Saturday night and barring any unforeseen disasters, it will be the night. The night that I finally break the hold my ex-husband, Jack, has over me and spread my legs for another man.
All day it’s been hot; you can’t walk from the market to your room—just three blocks in total—without needing a shower at the end of it. Why isn’t anyone else dripping with sweat, you wonder as you walk as slowly as you can down the shady side of the street.
The civil unrest of the sixties and seventies has been over for almost fifty years, but in Arms Wide Open: A Midwife’s Journey, Patricia Harman (Beacon Press) manages to remind my generation (Generation X), and generations after, exactly what it was that those hippies were trying to accomplish.
In the catacombs of the Belz Factory Outlet Mall hung a pair of rayon Day-Glo orange shorts with a fat black elastic waistband, the missing piece to my patchwork fashion sense. My mother didn’t flinch when I pulled it off the steel carousel with “clearance” in starburst font on top.
My husband runs, too, but to say that we are both runners is like saying that the man who gave us “Pants on the Ground” and Beethoven are both musicians. Already forgot “Pants on the Ground” and the man who gave it to us? Exactly.
You are five years old. You play with Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Ponies and have three Cabbage Patch Kids. You cry every night when you think no one is listening. Your mother walks in on you and asks what’s wrong and you look up at her with 40-year old eyes and say, “I don’t know.” Mother takes you to see a “talking doctor,” as she calls it. A doctor for you to talk to, Lisa. You climb into the gigantic leather chair and notice all the spider plants hanging from the ceiling. You aren’t too interested in this man; you want to swing from the vines of the plants.
