An archive of all of the personal essays we’ve published at Hippocampus Magazine over the years.
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.
I left my small valley-town-dirt-road Pennsylvania for the heat of the city, the humidity viscous on my skin. My fathers had to be here somewhere.
I was 26 years old; the same age my father was when he arrived in America in 1969 with seventy-five cents in his pocket. It was my first birthday without him
I grew up knowing Aunt Oma was going to hell. Mom and Dad often talked about it in the front seat of our Thunderbird on the way home from church.
