It’s that time after a visitation, in which everyone starts to leave, or maybe, to flee. They’ve seen the open casket. They’ve looked down upon the deceased; the funeral home has attempted to make the dead look as they did in life. (It hardly ever works.) Folks attending the visitation quietly but quickly move away …
Brokedown Palace Katie Sullivan For the past two months, when my thumb tapped its way to a digital copy of American Beauty, it wavered, and then wandered away. I feared it. I feared the warm, twangy intro of “Box of Rain,” the memory of my father singing it guilelessly out of tune, of realizing …
Flow my tears Claire Miller Skriletz Flow my tears, fall from your springs… How nice it must be to be able to cry at the right times, instead of sobbing for no apparent reason when life is going well. Or to be able to cry when someone close dies. Exiled, forever, let me mourn. Is …
I’ve been thinking about monsters. Not the zombies I usually research and write about, but the language of monsters that lurks in our everyday speech. The rhetoric of horror is so pervasive and so present. It comes to us when we have something to speak that seems unspeakable. It is deployed to justify violence and harm. …
Sophie the dog died last week. She had surgery to fix her bladder. The surgery had complications. Sophie had to be put to sleep. These are the facts, but as is often the case, the facts leave so much unsaid. My mother-in-law called my husband to let us know, and he told me. I cried (and I …