Even in her mid-forties Suzanne would call herself ugly. She’d bemoan her looks and point to them as the root of her lifetime despair.
What Rules by Jennifer Alessi
Category: Essays
An archive of all of the personal essays we’ve published at Hippocampus Magazine over the years.
On Getting Dressed by Sharon Stephenson
I feel especially put together because I am wearing an outfit; I bought all three pieces at the same time, indicating my financial stability and dedication to appearance.
Do You Have Anything to Declare? by Angela Palm
I suppose I could have said that I was between jobs, or that I was changing careers. That I’d been distracted by the curious landscape of southern Quebec…
Concrete by Riley H. Welcker
Father was the kind of man who separated the halves of his finger just to show my brothers and me the red flesh after accidentally slicing it with a construction knife…
Honor by Reynold Junker
…neither Roger nor I had dates that night. We’d spent the last two hours sitting in our skivvies underwear and robes in Roger’s room…discussing our almost-completed term papers.
Lessons in Sign by Jennifer Alise Drew
We leave the car in a narrow spot along the shoulder of Highway 1 and slide the boy into the red backpack, careful as we work his long legs through the seat…
Variations on Prayer by Sophie Lucido Johnson
They are a parade of stringless, impossibly fast kites; so kaleidoscopic that a sighting conjures questions of hallucination.
The Grand Hotel Mackinac Island by Thomas Gibbs
… a nurse had shown me a cancer kid’s crayon drawing. “See that little blue car down there at the bottom of the hospital the child drew? That’s your car.”
Who Watches the Guáchiman? by Robert Isenberg
An older man with a boyish face will always grimace and nod. He won’t wave because his hands are always folded over his belt.
A Manual for Fire and Stories by Hannah Straton
Flames rejoice around the kindling, their elegantly dangerous silhouettes leaping from stick to log and back to stick again, bright against the dark of the night.
