Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…
The Marine said his name was Dusty. She said hers was Laila, which was the name on the fake ID Kareena presented to the bouncer at the Wave Waikiki. If Crystal hadn’t led the way in a tube top…
By Devon Halliday • When I worked as a literary agent assistant, one of my tasks was to read (or skim) the manuscripts that my boss had requested from promising, unagented authors to determine whether my boss should offer…
Dark birds fly from my eyes. Disappear. Where do the kittens come from? We don’t have a cat. Just kittens lumped together like a single entity. A litter. In a box a blanket a bag on the passenger seat?…
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
The first thing they had to do was name us, as if we were rescues or strays. As if they would need a way to gossip about us, to get our attention. We mostly did not like our new…
Number one had cerulean blue eyes and haloed heat as we danced at Sadie Hawkins in our matching flannel shirts and he wandered night stairs and stars almost as stoned as his mother and strummed “Dust in the Wind”…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
You fluff the white rice for lunch. Aroma of fermented soybean paste stew wafts in the air. Gazing out the open window, you tense. You slap the rice paddle on the counter and rush outside, charging headfirst across the…
“My memory serves me far too well.” —George Michael 1979 I’ve heard the story a hundred times. Fourteen phone call attempts before my mother snagged my brother’s first babysitter, Sarah, a quick-witted high school sophomore. She showed up from…
I began the essay “The Babysitter” in July 2022 at the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, a workshop that bases pedagogy on exhaustive writing. The workshop’s leader often used “chunking” to demonstrate good writing, that is, intentionally dividing up a multipage essay with specific headings. My godmother/former babysitter and my mother’s conflict lasted twenty-seven or so years, but both women were and are equally important in my whole life for different reasons. As I began writing, I thought about every year from the past and the contributions of these two women to my growth. I have a mind like a filing cabinet, each drawer containing a year of my life. I simply pulled out another drawer when moving from one year to another.
In English we don’t write the way we speak, as any English-language learner will tell you, so I incorporated letters and dialogue for variation of tone and style. Otherwise, my own prejudice against passive voice renders that specific syntax absent from this essay, except for one or two instances. Writing in first person, I sometimes utilized apostrophe, writing directly to the women featured in this essay. I mapped out what I would write in each year/chunk from beginning to the end. The essay originally started with my parents’ marriage in 1976, but this beginning was ultimately superfluous, as the narrative truly begins when Sarah enters our lives.
ANDREW BORNEMAN is a teacher and college counselor at an independent school in Baltimore. His short story “The Storm” won the Henry-York Steiner first-place award for short fiction at Grinnell College in 2003. He will begin his MFA in fiction and creative nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts in July 2023. Find him on Twitter @AndrewBorneman1 and Instagram @andrewborneman.
