This Is Not a Story About a Ghost
This is a story about memory. About neurons misfiring, about the strange space between dream and awake, that feeling, when I’m falling asleep, of falling backwards, swinging my arms up to catch myself.
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Posts Tagged: hospital
Breaking and Burning
They pin him down and I stick him. I am relentless. This disease is relentless. And I am so pissed off.
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Keeping Secrets from the Stupid
I was four years old when my mother taught me to lie. There were certain instances, she explained, when lying was acceptable, when it wasn’t even lying, really.
...morePrescribing Poetry with Pills
There are things poetry can do and things it can’t. And while my aim is to ease suffering, sometimes the work is to be with it. Finding the words to console someone ill or grieving is an intensely complicated process. What do you say to someone in a waiting room fraught with anxiety? Over at […]
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My Sister’s Ghost
Only you recognize that this is your sister’s nature, that she’s a fixer.
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Ursa Major
Last month a bear ripped into my tent, clenched his teeth onto my upper left arm, just below my shoulder, and would not let go.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Admission of Guilt
Last summer, I nearly killed my son. It was an accident, but the guilt I live with belongs to those whose malicious deeds are intentional.
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Wild Things
Statistics make us feel safe, but most of the time, they can’t predict what’s really going to happen in our life. We believe in them anyway, though.
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Dispatch from the Carnival #4: Taking in the Sword
What is this body if you take its power over you away? In the torture arts, you are both the creator and recipient of your pain.
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Off Record
Think of this as an origin story without an origin. This is as close as you can get.
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The Animals in My Home
I let the flame get low. I fall asleep before blowing it out. I know I shouldn’t, but in the moments when I wake from nightmares, I like the warmth the candle offers, despite the danger.
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Strong Is the New Sexy
I began to lack reality. I took to baggy tops and A-line silhouettes to hide my poking collarbone, my meatless hips. I took up as much space as I could in bulky sweaters. I compensated for my diminishing reality by covering over my negative space.
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Three Things I Have Never Told Anyone
Does it seem now like I believe in God and he is a comfort to me? I don’t, and he isn’t. And yet this story is a comfort to me.
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After the Fall
I’ve never been clear on the nature of the injury to the brain. Something so fragile, I like to think of it as shattering like glass.
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About the Human Hymen (Disambiguation)
And because I had all of that ice to think about, it was difficult to understand what my gynecologist was saying about what he had just done inside of my body.
...more“I Just Wasn’t In the Mood to Be Bossed Around”
In the latest installment of The Toast’s “unglamorous series about DUIs and drinking problems,” Rebecca Pederson relates everything she remembers about being hit by an intoxicated driver while crossing the street one night. It’s remarkable not just for the inherent horror of the events (“I heard my skull crack before I felt it”) but also […]
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