The day after Mary Ellen was arrested, Mama made biscuits and gravy. I woke to the smell of bacon grease popping in the skillet, thick and salty, mixed with something heavier—flour catching on cast iron. The air already felt thick, even with the windows cracked. I slipped on my Sunday dress, the pale blue one with the peter-pan collar and padded barefoot through the hallway. The fan in the living room pushed warm air around like it was doing something. The linoleum in the kitchen was cool, cracked at the corners. My bare heels stuck to it when I walked.

My daughter Frankie doesn’t say my name. She knows it. I’ve heard her whisper it at night, curled up in her toddler bed, when the house is quiet and the shadows stretch across the floor. “Mommy,” she breathes, and for a second I believe I’ve dreamed it. At night, behind her door, she practices. Soft words slip out like secrets, as if she’s testing them before anyone can hear. Pressure shuts her down. But in the dark, when no one is watching, her voice feels safe. In the daylight, I try. I kneel. I call to her. She turns to me, eyes bright, smile full, but I can tell she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. She opens her mouth like she’s going to answer, but instead I hear bits of “Old McDonald” or sounds that don’t quite form words.

At night, when the house settles into its own quiet, I open YouTube and visit the dead. A man with a calm voice walks through a cemetery in Los Angeles, his camera steady as he points to the names carved in marble. The title reads Hollywood Graveyard: Legends of Old Hollywood. I know his rhythm by now: the slow pan to a headstone, the hum of birds, the trimmed grass that looks almost staged.I started watching in 2020 during the pandemic, when the world blurred between headlines and hospital coun...

It’s 1:17 a.m., and I’m sitting on the floor of my kitchen drinking Dr Pepper Blackberry out of the can like it’s medicine for a heartbreak I haven’t earned yet. I haven’t cried today, but I can feel it coming, crouched behind my molars. This beverage might be the gateway. The label promises “Delightfully Dark. Subtly Sweet,” which, coincidentally, is also how I described myself during a short-lived phase in college when I tried to brand myself as “the mysterious girl who reads Bukowski and wear...

It started with a palm frond. One of those thick, green giants that fan out over Florida yards like they own the place. My Uncle Bob ripped one clean off the tree, held it high over his head, and marched barefoot around the pool. Jimmy Buffett’s “Volcano” blared from the lanai speakers, steel drums skipping over sun-soaked chaos. Kids doing cannonballs, adults sloshing bourbon in plastic cups, and bathing suits doubling as dinner clothes. He said nothing. Just grinned and kept moving. We followed. Every one of us. Cousins dripping pool water, aunts in cover-ups, and the dogs trotting at our heels, nails clicking on the pavement as if they were tap dancing. The conga line snaked through the screen door, into the kitchen, and around the card table stacked with paper plates and Publix potato salad. No one asked why.

Feeds: PO AD LIB. It appeared one morning in blue ink on her whiteboard, just below her weight and care times—another piece of coded hospital language I wasn’t meant to understand. Another mysterious acronym in a sea of them, bobbing somewhere between hope and heartbreak. I stared at those three words for a long time. After five weeks of bracing myself for bad news and interpreting every beep, chart, and monitor, here was a phrase so quiet I nearly missed it. In the NICU, everything meant something, and anything could mean everything. Where one small change could unravel everything or stitch something back together. No one warns you that birth can drop you into another world. Where day and night are meaningless and your child’s life depends on machines that sound like alarms in a spaceship.

The story begins, as so many legends do, around a table. Ernest Hemingway, the tale goes, was sitting with fellow writers in a bar or restaurant when he made a wager. For ten dollars from each of them, he claimed he could write a complete story in only six words. Hemingway scribbled on a napkin and passed it around: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. The others, the story goes, paid up.Historians and critics still argue about whether the event ever happened, or whether Hemingway even wrote those...

Ferris wheel turning. Slow. Too slow. Lights twitch on like startled eyes. Air thick with kettle corn sweetness. Grease cooling on metal. Burnt sugar clinging to the teeth. Beneath it, the taste of pennies left too long in the mouth. Pumpkins on the judging table. Collapsing inward. Flies tracing lazy circles. The judges gone but their fingerprints still dent the softened skin. Twilight seeps like water into wool. The sky flickers between wound and fire. Ticket in my palm. Tilt-a-Whirl. Paper warm. My mother once held one here. Same month. Same fairground. Her laugh always sharper in autumn, breaking into coughs she swore were from the cold.

The crunching of crispy pine needles beneath my sneakers echoed among the trees. As I trekked through the small, wooded lot beside our home, my older sister, Donna, gripped the chains of her seat swing. She was completely oblivious to her surroundings, which included my random bursts of singing. Her legs dangled above the scuffed grass while she swayed back and forth. The Walkman cassette player clipped to her jeans pocket blared a Stevie Nicks song about white doves. Mom had instructed Donna to watch me that day while she worked yet another twelve-hour shift at Hollywood Memorial Hospital. Donna huffed and whined as usual. She claimed to have more important things to do than watch her obnoxious younger sister. “Mom, I’m almost twelve,” I said as my cheeks reddened from a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “I don’t need a babysitter!”

WHEN I WAS five years old, my elementary school held an assembly that included a special visitor, Harry the Habit Kicker. (Harry was actually our school resource officer in a giant bear costume.) He wore a shirt that read SAY NO TO DRUGS, and he carried a white bag with BAD STUFF scrawled across it. Harry demonstrated the consequences of drugs by placing the bag into his mouth. We all watched in horror as he jumped around, waving his fuzzy arms frantically, then fell to the floor, dead.

It’s difficult to devote your life to a family that will never embrace you fully. Especially when your newly acquired family, by law, constantly expects utter devotion. Such was the case for Mrs. Mary Louise Elmwood, a young woman from a highly respected family in northern Alabama. It was a fine match; a proper combination between two well-off esteemed families. Mr. Robert Elmwood, although barely thirty, had already established quite the reputation for himself as a steadfast lawyer in the newly exquisite courthouse in downtown Athens. He was a ruthless lawyer in the courtroom, who never let any criminal walk away without some legal punishment. Some said those reprimands extended outside of those halls, and into the streets of downtown Athens. But Mary Louise didn’t partake in such rumors.

There is a permanent imprint on memory when smoke infiltrates the senses. I was awaiting my cue with a few other clowns when the foul smell of burning canvas reached me. Dressed in oversized pants that were barely held up by my flimsy suspenders and an unshaven face covered in thick white paint, I called myself Weary Willie, a sad hobo clown with a permanent frown. I always got the short end of the stick, yet I never gave up. An important lesson my pa taught me and one in which I impressed on the children who came to the Ringling Circus. Had I known what was to occur that day, I wouldn’t have bothered plastering on my unhappy persona.

The room is white in a way that feels intentional. Not sterile. Manufactured. A white that hums softly beneath the surface. It has no corners, no clock. Just a smooth table and two chairs. One of them is already occupied.         The man sitting across from me wears a dark suit and no expression. His eyes are the exact color of boiled water. His tie is slightly askew.         “Ms. Collins,” he says.         “Yes?” My voice comes out hoarse. I haven’t used it in a while. Or maybe I’ve...

Pulling Up Azaleas: A cheating husband in a failed marriage blames his wife for the gun pointed at him.

They tell us the swamp has a mouth. Not teeth, not tongue, not lips—just a mouth big enough to swallow a whole town. When the night is hot and the frogs scream too loud, you can hear it breathe. Inhale: the cypress bow. Exhale: the sawgrass rattles. Mama says if you lean close enough to the water, it will whisper your name, syllable by syllable, until you forget it was ever yours.

2. Chappelle’s Show: White People’s Reaction Videos Edition: Each episode features a vintage sketch followed by a panel of white millennials squirming in real time, saying things like, “This was funny in 2004, right?” and “I think we’ve grown… I mean, I’ve grown?” No jokes are made, only reckonings.

I once participated in a collaborative writing exercise where we each contributed a short passage to build a shared story. The setting was the rural South in the early 1900s: dusty porches, hymnals, women stirring pots while watching the horizon for news. One writer turned in a single page that read like a drunk voicemail. Every other word was “fuck” or “shit.” The voice didn’t match the setting, didn’t reveal character, didn’t move the story. It broke the entire spell.