An archive of all of the personal essays we’ve published at Hippocampus Magazine over the years.
Sean tries to convince me that I have no idea what I’m getting into, and that as soon as I do, I will leave him. The diabetes that exploded his eyes and killed his kidneys is still ever-present. So I could see his point.
Soft, thumping mallets are now sledgehammers, trying to whack their way out of the cheap particleboard of your head. Some unseen battle rages on in your floaty, pickled brain, and another is duking it out in your gut.
I was a mishmash of two worlds, a social experiment in a locale where “different” did not come up very often. My dark hair stood out in a sea of blonde.
I crossed streets to find a grocery store, all the while imagining myself slipping in front of an oncoming truck. I wiped snow out of my eyes with tears, thinking at least that way my mother would never have to know about the forty days.
Which was better: fishing with my grandfather or fishing with my grandson? I spent blissful days devoting all my spare neurons to contemplating the question, aided by the occasional mug of Laphroaig.
I am grateful for the distance between my home in Oregon and his delusions in Idaho.
… it’s the only place I could find diesel, standing in a sweatshirt when it’s thirty below, standing there without gloves on and pumping the fuel into a red gasoline jug.
Mother had developed her muscles in red tasseled boots as the majorette for her high school band and lifting heavy trays in her parents’ restaurant. Lucretia developed hers picking cotton and carrying firewood.
My father is frozen in space, iced over, and I wonder what happens inside of him, where the blood still runs warm.
It’s astonishing that so much life can fit into a little jar.
