Resilience resonates differently with each of our contributors and their works; it will likely for you as well. We hope that you join us in diving into these pieces of pain and joy, anguish and aspiration, as we each reflect on our histories, our futures, and our resilience. Read more →
Elliot loved clouds.
He loved them all. The dark grey ones frowning before a storm, the colourful ones blooming across the sunset sky, the fluffy ones stretching lazily as cats. Read more →
They say that mushrooms and fungi are resilient organisms, highly resistant to stress. They have a fleshy resistance and can sprout overnight. They are practically everywhere yet easy to overlook. Merlin Sheldrake once wrote: “They are humble yet astonishingly versatile organisms, eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere.” Read more →
The Black Sea Nettle, the Blue Blubber, the Pink Meanie, the Sea Wasp, the Flower Hat, the Cannonball, the Darth Vader, and the Fried Egg. The Butterflies drift like embroidered hankies dropped by dainty damsels. The Mauve Stingers pulse with the coloring of a rotting, uprooted mushroom. The Medusa Cassiopeias glow like lava lamp chandeliers and the Crown Jellyfish glint like bedazzled vulvas. The deadly Portuguese Man ‘O War (commonly mistaken for a jellyfish but actually a siphonophore) looks like a box of blue Otter Pops left to melt in the sun. Most likely, it was the transparent parachute of the Aurelia labiata or Moon Jellyfish that collided with you that day. Read more →
Harriet married a gossip columnist when she was 26. It seemed like they were uncomplicated kindreds, but Richard, who liked to be referred to by his assumed, not-very-clever-at-all, pun on insert celebrity’s name here nom-de-plume, tended to bring his work home with him. At 26 and a half, Harriet was on a first name basis with the intimate life details [confirmed, unconfirmed, didn’t matter] of several hundred [or so] people of varying degrees of local and pop-culture relevance. At 26 and three quarters, she’d acquired a keenness for the d-listers. She found their tenacity fascinating—how they would barrel forward from their short-lived sitcom personas or sporting careers or various other feats of fleeting notoriety, putting themselves in increasingly more bizarre and perverse situations to squeeze the last seconds out of their proverbial 15 minutes. She’d try the same pharmaceuticals they did, for re-creational purposes. She would buy their jewelries or perfumes or clothing lines with the same conviction estranged sisters sip tea after years of frostbitten phone conversations: just happy to be there to share something in common after so long. Read more →
When the first man disappears, his absence is blamed on a top-secret business meeting, or an illicit affair. A dollop of gossip for cocktail hour, a garnish for the canapés.
Cottage time is for unwinding. For being one with nature. It’s when the wives wear subtle makeup and sport sweatpants with cartoon bear-claw-slashes on their bums. They’re mostly second wives or first wives with second noses. Read more →