Essay by Ruth Minah Buchwald • What keeps you up at night? For me, it’s genocide, climate change, another epidemic, hopeless politics, something embarrassing that I said in middle school, the finite nature of time, and so on, but…
Do I “heart” this? My finger hovers over the outline of a heart beside a photo of a curly-haired woman grinning, her arms wrapped around two tan dogs. It’s a Friday night, a few months after I moved to…
Kimberly King Parsons, whose sparkling debut novel We Were the Universe is a USA Today national bestseller, is serving as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 First Chapters Contest. From the outset, Associate Editor Rowena Leong Singer was…
My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy…
Content Warnings—alcohol overdose, death Welcome to the Grocery Supreme Aptitude Test™. This test is divided into the following five sections: Commuting and Tardiness, Opening Duties, Product Management, Customer Service, and Long Answer Questions. A few important notes: You…
I think it matters that her husband was older. He owned his own house when they met. He also owned a coffee shop on Lattimore. And Mrs. Haverhill, then—to distinguish herself from the other long-necked, loose-sweatered girls in the…
Here’s a secret about movement: speed cares only about distance, but velocity is aware of direction. Here’s another secret about movement: every living creature on this planet is moving fast. But the body tricks us into not noticing the…
1. The first ghost I ever learn about is God, circa 1998, in a kindergarten classroom in Queens, New York. My parents have sent me to Catholic school not out of religious devotion, or some need for strictness, but…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Ingrid Rojas Contreras as guest judge for our 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award. Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Hailed as “original, politically daring, and passionately written” by Vogue, her first novel, Fruit of…
My father, after slipping backward on a stretch of rooted Alaskan ice and hitting his head, miraculously walks the three miles to get back home—heavily concussed and alone—with our two unleashed labs directing him in the winter dark. He…
“Even Though He Fell” started off as an idea in my Notes app simply titled, Essay that repeats itself. I knew it was going to be about my father’s concussion, and I knew it was going to be about mine too. What wasn’t so clear was how I would be able to show my confusion, isolation, and panic. For me, my father was the person I could rely on during my parents’ divorce, who cared for me when I had migraines, and so when he had a concussion, I was thoroughly shaken. At the time, I didn’t have the tools to properly work through how I was affected. Instead, I studied essays such as “An Avalanche’s Lessons in Grief” by Christy NaMee Eriksen and “Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof” by Joy Katz, which both weave in larger themes about fathers and what they leave behind. Their use of avalanches and tennis, respectively, reveals how fathers imprint themselves onto us by their passions and the environments they foster. Once gone, these unassuming imprints become anchors in processing traumatic events.
When I write, I see myself as an archeologist who digs at the earth until the skeleton of a story is revealed as a jumbled mess. The story won’t be reconstructed perfectly, but what’s important is the pieces exist. This essay’s structure is fractured, imperfect, and disorienting at times because I wanted to convey how the fall still rattles me. The backbone I finally found was to use the little knowledge I had of coding to process these intensely emotional moments. Programming is often a frustrating and solution-oriented skill, wherein a single error can prevent the rest of the code from working. The “error” I couldn’t stop thinking about was how helpless I felt living multiple states away from my father. I have constantly wondered what would’ve happened had I been there; what would’ve happened if he hadn’t called me; what would’ve happened if he’d never made it home. The questions are repetitive, unrelenting, and exhausting. Though through the turmoil, coding allowed me to contextualize my father’s concussion and uncover how vulnerable both of us turned out to be.
MAXWELL SUZUKI is a queer writer who lives in Los Angeles. Maxwell’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, South Dakota Review, and Cheat River Review. He is the prose editor of Passengers Journal and reads for Split/Lip Press. He is writing a novel on the generational disconnect between Japanese-American immigrants and their children. Find Maxwell on Twitter @papasuzuki.
