You weigh 214 lbs. Your bulletproof vest weighs 4 lbs. and 5 oz. Your duty belt weighs 14 lbs. and 13 oz. Some days, I want to know the weight of all the things you carry.
The Police Officer’s Wife by Melissa Knackmuhs Kiefer
Category: Essays
An archive of all of the personal essays we’ve published at Hippocampus Magazine over the years.
Letting Go: In Her Words by Lea Page
In theory, my husband and I supported the idea of Nina going away to school. The confines of our small rural town had become stifling for her… But was she ready?
Shells by Chris Arthur
Two photographs of my Uncle Tony are the obvious place to begin. One shows him in an open grave with another man. In the second, he’s being embraced by a vampire.
Card Catalogues by Marcia Bradley
My daughter Frances is a reader. Not that she’d appreciate me telling you this. She doesn’t like me to categorize her. Even though saying someone is a reader should be good. Right? It’s not like saying she’s a thief.
A Member of the Family by Morgan Smith
When he withdraws his right hand from the can, I see that it’s Cholo, one of the more dangerous mental patients and he has a blue plastic Gillette razor.
Big Sky Mind by Emilie Rohrbach
…here I was as the plane ascended, a 33-year-old, hunched over on my knees and harnessed to Don, a man who is supposedly in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most jumps out of an airplane…
Mind Readers and Marble Orchards by Lasher Lane
At the wake, smoking was considered fine near the living, but thoughtless and disrespectful near the dead, so my grandmother and her sisters took a cigarette break in the downstairs lounge.
Fisher Cats by Marissa Higgins
I was eight years old the first time my mother called me fat. I was living with my mother for the summer, as a reward for her being clean and sober.
Crossing Abbey Road by Laurie Baker
Here’s something you might not actually know: Abbey Road is just an ordinary road. Surprising, given the notoriety of that irreverent Beatles album cover of the same name.
With Dogs as My Shepherd by Corinne Heyning Laverty
No dogs allowed. John said they would eat his tortoises. My husband was a whale biologist and many of the former residents of our California beach bungalow reflected this interest.
