Steven Barker’s debut book is a compilation of essays about what it’s like working as a temporary employee, joining the nearly “17 million contract workers in the U.S.”
After they went home at night, my mother brought me with her to the factory to clean up after the Big Wigs, not to teach me how to clean, but to teach me how not to spend my life…
We were gathered one afternoon in the Coopers’ tiny living room. The second oldest, who couldn’t have been much more than sixteen, offered me a puff on his cigarette.
Heading out the driveway, my finger searched for the START button on my sports watch as I prepared to stretch my body into a long mid-morning run.
We peered into tidal pools, kneeling to get our noses up close, to watch creeping snails and huddled mussels, skimming our fingers over carpets of barnacles, stuck like superglue to the rocks.
People died here…for a cause many of them didn’t fully understand or believe in. Young boys of 17, no older than my high school students, enlisted thinking the war would be some grand adventure
The Fish and Game folks were hauling lights and bins out of their trucks when we arrived for the Jonesville, Florida, bat count of 2006.
On Tuesdays, old Appalachian men swarm the Kroger parking lot. In pairs, the old men wear polo shirts or plaid button-ups in primary colors.
My first night as chaplain. Paramedics rush a gurney through the automatic doors of the ER, the patient’s body flying like a luger down an icy track.
Cappello’s almanack…positions itself as a way station of mood: a resting place where writer and reader both might try to make sense of moods, even though life might break the mood at any time.
