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Adolescence

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The End Of The World

Maybe the end of the world wasn’t fire and explosions and lawlessness and bodies in the streets. Maybe the end of the world was some smaller thing.

By Richard Scott Larson February 2023
Poetry

Vanished

Where do those lost socks / go? The ones that vanish / between washer and dryer, / submerge in suds and never / surface again?

By Rebecca Baggett December 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

We Fools

When Nonna Venere visited, she arrived by train like in a movie, stepping down from the first-class compartment enveloped by smoke, wearing a cloche with a veil. She had four large suitcases and no gifts.

By Rosanna Staffa November 2022
Fiction

Bottom Feeders

I feel close to Dad on the drive home, our legs mud-dry and tired, the tackle box between us, the pillowcase full of fish and ice. She’ll never admit it, but Mom will be impressed, I’m sure. In a million years she’d never guess how we caught so many. I’ll never tell.

By Peter Short October 2022
The Dog-Eared Page

Somebody’s Baby

We can see, if we care to look, that the way we treat children — all of them, not just our own, and especially those in great need — defines the shape of the world we’ll wake up in tomorrow.

By Barbara Kingsolver September 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Private Thing

People laugh about pubescent horniness and untimely erections, but nobody talks about getting them before puberty on a regular basis. I was aroused whenever nothing was demanded of my limbs or mind — in class, at church, on the bus, in the car. Once, I even got hard at football practice while staring off at the Catskill Mountains and half-assing my way through groin stretches.

By John Paul Scotto September 2022
Readers Write

Learning The Hard Way

Hitching a ride, trusting a partner, marrying the same person three times

By Our Readers September 2022
Quotations

Sunbeams

The roots of a child’s ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child’s having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return.

Fred Rogers

September 2022
Readers Write

The Bus

A fifth-grade bully, a blossoming romance, a late-night crash

By Our Readers August 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Beetle King

My chest, which was beginning to grow round in the wrong places, had to be hidden under a T-shirt no matter how hot or sweaty I became. Out in the desert I had to squat behind the cover of creosote bushes to pee. At home in my family’s Airstream I was my parents’ youngest daughter, but up in the paloverde I felt like one of the boys.

By Zoë Bossiere July 2022