No. 7: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
I want to be spared the wrecking ball, I want to stay in this place, the best place I've ever lived,
in the best city there is to live, forever. But my Brooklyn haven is a precarious nest because it's
slated for demolition.
My children, who I call the dwarfs, at the end of the day, after I've concocted them three meals, sometimes four, have a habit of asking for warm milk and a platlet of fruit or bowl of dried banana.
We shuffle in the grass. Andrea is close to me, much shorter in the dark. There is the smell of wood smoke among the bare trees, it is on the roof of my mouth. We search but there is no rope to see. We get our jeans muddy.
I definitely wasn’t expecting any of this and had no idea the night was going to take such a turn.
At 5 a.m. I heard the phone ring. It must have been the ring’s tail, because as soon as I heard it, it stopped. My first thought — a mistake. I returned to deep sleep snoring like a koala bear, hibernating. And as my body slowly sagged into to la-la land, I tried to revisit my dream, but alas, it was gone!
Read On
Share your story!
Popcorn is a bimonthly digital zine. We accept any and all submissions from current and former Sense Writing students. Story length should be 1000 words or less, and conceived through the Sense Writing practice. Stories are clustered based on emerging commonalities and then published. While each submission may not be published in the upcoming issue, we are committed to featuring everyone's work eventually.
Edited by Hannah Sparks
A disquiet will creep up for no immediately apparent reason. When it hits us, we’ll try our best to to make excuses for it: a bad dream, an unexpected rendezvous, or the dull throes of missing someone. Not always ready to admit that it’s not the effect, but the cause. It’s a basic, inescapable condition of all life.
The anxiety of an unanswered, unknown caller is one we all share, as in Stephen Horenstein’s “The Ring.” Kate Prascher reveals those disjointed feelings you have towards to friends who become joined in marriage in “Jesus: Everybody Find the Rope.” Mateo Lynch’s “That Night” explores the self-justified psyche of an adulter. But for Liz Moniz’s “Waiting in Grace,” there is no making excuses, only resignation with a hint of complacency. Lucy Lyon describes the dual reality of raising children while missing their father overseas in “Small Voices.”
These stories confess the kinds of vexations that are a given in life, and examine our attempt to quell them. We might push back, push through, or push down, but at least we’re asking questions.