Category: Uncategorized

by Kurt Schmidt

Realizing I had bad parents was a revelation that seeped in gradually, sucking away my freedom to be a normal child. Had things been different, I might have become more than an anxious replication of their genetic soup, lacking any clues as to whether my parents loved one another. At times when a bolt in his head came loose, Dad said Mom had to prove she loved him.

by James Dodds

Lena was raised on violin lessons and minimal parental supervision. “And by ‘minimal,’” she declared to her private tutor, Henri, “I mean none. Zip. Nada. I’ve spent more time with you and my violin instructors than I have with them.” She laughed and grabbed her Scott Cao by the pegs, flipping it hard and high into the air so it spun in a tight circle. 

by  Jason Brown

The old family joke wasn’t so funny after my mother died. Of course, my father never really found it funny. The name his parents gave him plagued Dad throughout his life. Even his own father would often say that, when he was older, he’d have four children who would be turned into swans by their wicked stepmother. On his first day at school, the teacher; on hearing his name: said, “Ah! Your mother is a fan of Shakespeare, I see!” Immediately my father corrected him:“No sir. My name is Lír. L-I-(fada)-R. As in, The Children of…”

 by Margaret Buckhanon

He owed this to two women: his beloved wife Zelda and a hometown agoraphobic girl.  A ghost, hideous she was, and, intelligent. A cultured world traveler from reading, she went everywhere from nowhere tuck safely in her room above the family café. Young Morse worked as a boy of sixteen, washing dishes, feeding white folks including the ones who roamed the balmy southern nights hunting for incorrigible blacks, specifically males, who did not know their place.