When I was twelve, my parents took me to see an eccentric house in Wheeling, West Virginia. Plastic statues in clashing scales and jubilant disarray erupted from the house’s property lines: reindeer, jack-o-lanterns, Santas, teddy bears, flamingoes, nutcrackers, Jesus, Joseph, swans, Mary, and Magi, all interspersed with American flags. The owner had created a rickety grid-work of grotto-like displays extending around the home’s perimeter, a polyptych taken over by American holiday icons.
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Song about a Squid By Matthew Gavin Frank
So why the giant squid, after all? How did this particular beast become the basis for our Kraken? Why is it that when we think of the proverbial Sea Monster, the image most of us generate is one that most closely resembles the giant squid? Why is this animal the recipient of our need to mythologize? The giant squid is real, yet somehow remains, simultaneously, in the realm of myth. What combinatory cocktail does the giant squid embody that allows it, to the human world, to straddle both worlds: the actual and the legendary? Maybe it’s merely a fusion of its size and its rarity.
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The White Death By Justin Hocking
I contracted my own White Death back in graduate school, when I was first assigned Moby-Dick, and had to wake up at five or six a.m. to swim its immense dark waters.
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Hold Your Phone to this Essay and Select Tag Now by Joe Bonomo
I left the bar humming bare traces, the final moments of the song like excavated bones, already fading in the daylight, in the archeology of my head.
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"I have a feeling if I went online right now and looked at any news or commentary website, I could find something that would stir me to a Hulk-style rage." - William Bradley
Panel Discussions: Just Imagine by William Bradley
Just imagine—there I was, standing in line at the Shop-N-Go convenience store across from the country club where my parents played golf. My dad and I were running some errand that evening. Most likely, we were getting milk. We rarely bought groceries at the Shop-N-Go—they were cheaper at Kroger’s, but Kroger’s was farther away from our house. If I had to guess, I’d say my mother had discovered that we didn’t have enough milk for breakfast, and so my dad was sent on a quick trip to remedy this. I went with him because we had recently spent a long time apart—he had moved to West Virginia ahead of us, several months before the school year ended. I had missed him terribly and took any opportunity to be near him. This was the fall of 1987, and I was eleven years old.
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At a Loss by Jacqueline Lyons
Maybe I was always going to be divorced, turning away from marriage before marrying.
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Communication Breakdowns By Elena Passarello
We expect sonic vigor from someone who promises change. We expect Reveille and bombast. We expect jock jams.
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Gone by Joe Bonomo
Jackie was an ugly girl. At age twelve, I could see it: the doughy, mottled face, the bulbous and hooked nose, the fat legs, the stringy hair. I confidently assumed the general playground condemnation of her, joined in the ranks of those who intuited, somehow, that she was less fortunate than the rest of us.
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Dislocated By William Bradley
You know that Nabokov traced the development of his consciousness to one of his earliest memories, the recognition that he and his parents were distinct human beings. And you know that in Speak, Memory, Nabokov often writes of memory as if the recalled events happened to someone else (“. . . I see my diminutive self . . .”) or as if they are occurring on a movie screen, viewed from his “present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time.” And though, let’s face it, you’re never going to be half the writer Nabokov was, you can appreciate this distinction between past and present, between the boy one was and the man one is.
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