Weekly Featured Essay
We feature new essays every Wednesday; make it a weekly habit to stop by and be enchanted by our eclectic content.
“…despite or because of racism, vitriolic politics, war, and rape, I’ve resolved to value beauty, whenever and wherever I find it.”–Sydney Lea, from “Question Marks”
Just what we need to be reminded of…
Question Marks
by Sydney Lea
Because I crave the dawn, at 5:30 this morning I walked a dirt lane in Vermont, the sun having just breached the eastern ridges. I saw my first butterfly of the year, spotlit by a beam, perched on coyote scat.
The scene didn’t typify what most people think of in conjuring butterflies. Even lacking its marks on either wing, we might label this insect Question Mark. In a season of renewal, the sentimentalist (like me) longs for flowers and nectar, or at least for things non-repulsive; but when it isn’t feeding on feces, the Question Mark likes a carcass or sap oozing from a tree, the ranker the better. I silently challenged it: “You’re an icon of spring! Can’t you act like one?”
MORE ESSAYS
I’m Having Sex and I Will Die: On (Nearly) Overcoming Purity Trauma
I’m sixteen and touching myself. Not even skin to skin. Through pyjamas and cotton knickers. “Masturbation,” Mum says. “All your problems come from that.” She must be right because our book Questions Young People Ask, Answers That Work argues that surely, masturbation is an unclean habit, even though it’s not mentioned in the Bible. Think consequences, I tell myself. Think how you’re hurting Jehovah. Masturbation is mentally and emotionally defiling. It leads to fornication, the book tells me. “Eww!” I write in my diary. “How gross!” But still, I can make myself come through thick fabric. Even though Mum has been in bed for days in the room next to mine. I lie on my back under my duvet, legs squeezed together, and use just one finger. Wipe my hand on the sheet because it’s dirty. Listen, in case anyone can hear my silence.
I’m twenty, I’m having sex, and I will die. All my life, I’ve attended three meetings a week. I learned that we are separate from the world, that I should not yolk with unbelievers. But only three weeks into my student exchange in Paris and I’m in bed with a Worldly man who tastes delicious—of mint and Lipton tea. I made a vow to Jehovah to remain clean, to not engage in fornication, but this hot student I met in French class played melancholic Italian songs on his guitar.
If I give into this temptation, it will feel like dying when I’m forced to confess my sin. Three Elders, indistinguishable from each other with their paunches and receding hair and dull suits, will judge my broken vow to Jehovah of no sex before marriage. I will be dead to my family when I’m disfellowshipped, when they cut me out of their life and home. It will be a living death to lose everyone I know. Shit.
Stigmata
by Angela Lam
1981
I’m ten years old, home alone with my sisters.
Five-year-old Elizabeth grabs seven-year-old Cynthia’s ballerina doll.
“Give her back!” Cynthia yells.
Elizabeth tugs so hard, she twists off the doll’s arm.
Cynthia screams. “You’re trying to kill her!”
I burst into the bedroom.
Elizabeth drops the doll and scales the shelves of the corner bookcase. Her eyes peer over the ledge like a cat ready to pounce.
“Make her get down,” Cynthia says, cradling her broken doll.
I’m not about to climb. But my mom is still working at the bank for another half hour. Fifteen minutes ago, my father left for work at the grocery store. I tell Cynthia to wait until Mom gets home. “She’s not going anywhere,” I say, tilting my chin toward the towering bookcase.
Thirty-five minutes later, the door between the kitchen and the garage opens.
Cynthia scuttles down the hallway. “Mom-mee! Elizabeth broke my ballerina.”
My mom hustles back to the bedroom and glances around. “I don’t see her,” she says.
I point. “Up there.”
My mom’s gaze travels up the length of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase. “My word, Lizzy, how did you get up there?”
“I’m not coming down,” she says.
My mom shrugs. “Go ahead. Stay up there.” She leaves to change out of her power suit and heels. But instead of making dinner, my mom calls my father at the grocery store. “Elizabeth climbed the bookcase. She won’t get down. I’m telling you something’s wrong with her. She doesn’t think like the other girls. We need to get her help.” My mom listens. She purses her lips and curls her free hand into a fist. “No, you don’t understand. She’s troubled. She needs to see a psychologist.” She slams down the phone. A moment later, it rings. She picks it up. “I’ll take her. You don’t have to go. It’s not a shame on the family. She needs help. We’re her parents. We need to help her.”
The Pugilists
by Sharman Ober-Reynolds
My husband and I attend a boxing class in Mill Creek, Utah, three times a week. My husband has Parkinson’s Disease, and the class is designed to make us “rock steady” to fight against it. Our coaches are mostly young and enthusiastic. To keep us motivated and help us get acquainted, they ask silly questions at the beginning of each class. Some of our answers have included: “What would you be if you lived in the ocean?” Dory and Marlon. “What historical figure would you be?” Fred and Wilma. My husband, a retired philosophy professor, loves questions and comics. He has large compilations of Pogo and Krazy Kat, which hereads almost daily alongside philosophers Quine and Putnam.
The boxing class is more practical than philosophical. It reminds me of kindergarten for seniors in slow motion. There are lockers and mats, and the gym is festively decorated for the holidays. Strings of colored lights hang between punching bags in the winter, brightening up the gym, which is tucked away in an ice-encrusted strip mall. On Valentine’s Day, we saran-wrapped pictures and words of things we want to fight against onto our punching bags; political tyrants, various exes, insomnia are popular targets. Ours is Parkinson’s.
Gone Missing
by Mark Cyzyk
Long ago, a high school classmate of mine disappeared.
There was no reason to believe he had run away or committed suicide. No apparent connection with illegal activities. He just disappeared.
As the years passed, our County Police came to investigate his disappearance as a homicide. They had a suspect but not much evidence, nor did they have a body.
They did not find the body for eight years.
I’ve often thought, then and now, how excruciating those eight years must have been for my classmate’s parents. Your son has disappeared from your lives. There is no body to indicate that he’s dead. He’s simply gone missing. The terrible abyss of loss yawns open, right to the tips of your toes. And this is something you stare into, day after day after day.
Slipstreamed
by Leanne Phillips
We enter the Salinas Valley from the south. As we drive into King City, California, it feels as if we are passing through a heavy curtain—the air feels old somehow, the way nostalgia might if it had an odor. It smells of mild onion and sweet dry grass and freshly-turned soil. John Ernst Steinbeck Sr. helped settle this town in 1890, and his son and namesake set his novel East of Eden here in 1952. He felt it, too, what I am feeling now. “I remember … what trees and seasons smelled like,” Steinbeck wrote. “The memory of odors is very rich.” This is the place where I was born, the place I reluctantly came home to when I had nowhere else to go.
King City is a small town at the southernmost end of Monterey County, population a little over twelve thousand. Not much has changed here since my mother graduated from King City High School in 1959. Many of the buildings on the south end of downtown are the same buildings that stood over a century ago—squat, square structures painted off-white, beige, red-brown. There are taller buildings with false ceilings and high, arched facades to make them look more majestic. The Reel Joy Theater, a movie house built before 1922, now accommodates a market; the marquee still towers over the entrance, but today it is a blank slate, and the theater’s poster cases act as community bulletin boards. The newspaper, The King City Rustler, was founded in 1901, its name drawn from a hat in the local barbershop. Fast food restaurants, gas stations, and a shopping center are exiled to the west side of town. My three grandchildren and I are passing through on our way to northern California for spring break.
The Plaza
by Doug Hoekstra
I recognized the Plaza in Santa Fe from the movie
Two-Lane Blacktop, the one with James Taylor and Warren Oates
racing down Route 66. Dennis Wilson was in it, too.
Warren Oates was underrated.
I’d been there once before with my ex-wife.
At the time she wasn’t my wife yet, but Uncle Felix died
left me a little money, just enough for a vacation
so we drove from Chicago to New Mexico, although…
we didn’t take Route 66 because I wasn’t nostalgic at the time.
I think I thought I knew everything back then.
I’ve Got You Covered
by Sharman Ober-Reynolds
When I turned five, I won the Bozo the Clown Home Birthday Prize. A girl in a red shirtwaist dress and Cat-Eye glasses picked my name out of a barrel spun by one of the show’s participants on TV, and I felt like a star. KTLA-TV must have notified my mother when the truck was scheduled to deliver my toys because, somehow, I knew. That’s why I faked a stomach ache. I wanted to be home when they arrived.
Mom settled me in bed with a dinner tray, crayons, and drawing paper and went off to sell magazines over the phone. She was a natural salesperson, likable, trustworthy, lively, and forbearing, listening more than she spoke. My dad used to say, “Your mother could sell bikinis in Alaska.” I heard her voice rise and fall in a reassuring sales pitch, so I slipped out of bed, crept into the living room, and kept a lookout for the Bozo the Clown truck. Before long, boredom, dull, and self-imposed enveloped me. So, in my pink chenille bathrobe, I wandered the house and poked through the kitchen junk drawer until I found a box of matches. Pushing open the small square box, I picked out a broken, slender piece of wood tipped with a perfect green bulb. In my bedroom, I struck the broken match against the wall, and it sputtered to life. I dropped the broken match in the trash when the flame reached my fingers. Within seconds, a fire blazed, incinerating the discarded pictures of horses and ballerinas I’d drawn that morning.
Island Party
by J Bryan McGeever
It’s my daughter’s first school dance, an informal gathering of parents and students at an elementary school playground in East Setauket, Long Island. Tonight’s event has an 80s nostalgia theme. Songs from various John Hughes films blare from the DJ’s speakers, transporting this bustling suburb back to a simpler time of big hair, MTV, and voodoo economics. Along the edge of the ad hoc dance floor stands a solitary fun-dad in an Adidas tracksuit and Kangol bucket hat. The party is just beginning.
As more people arrive, a pleasant carnival-like atmosphere takes over, kids zigzagging between the playground and the dance floor. Frankie Goes To Hollywood tells everyone to Relax as security guards in yellow windbreakers sift through the crowd. Some are retired NYPD. I discreetly eye their waists and the linings of their jackets. I don’t think they’re armed, and it troubles me that I wish they were.
Most parents chat amiably while their children roam the grounds. I trail mine from a comfortable distance like a devoted member of her Secret Service detail. The prospect of her vanishing into a crowd gives me short panic attacks. Her crew wants to know why she keeps pointing to different sections of the schoolyard, and I overhear her saying, “My dad needs to know where I am.” One of her cohorts looks at me, raising two fingers in the shape of an L before scampering off. Fair enough, Junior, but some situations call for excess.
