Tag: micro cnf

Animal Husbandry | Chris Cottom

I’m six years old when I marry my rabbit. After watching Princess Margaret’s black-and-white wedding on the television, I stand in our parquet-floored playroom, smart in my scarlet guardsman’s tunic and black trousers, holding Scrunchie, my black-and-white bride. 

My younger brother, Andrew, archbishop-perfect in a gold-flocked curtain-cloak, chants gobbledygook from an upside-down encyclopedia. The wedding feast is a choice of carrot or half a bag of chocolate buttons. 

Scrunchie has been married before. Daddy had paid five shillings for what was supposed to be two girl baby bunnies from Shepperton Pet Shop, but Pookie soon showed signs of what Mummy called dishonourable intentions. “He’s too amorous,” she said, as Daddy divided what had once been a chicken coop. “Maybe we’ll let him visit her when the time is right.”

My parents do not attend the ceremony. Daddy bangs around upstairs, packing for another trip. After he whizzes off, Mummy tells us they’re getting a divorce. None of my schoolfriends have parents who’ve got divorces and I worry they’ll need to be told, that the headmaster might announce it at Assembly, after the Lord’s Prayer.

Later, I’m sitting with my bunny bride on the piney sawdust of her chicken-coop house when Mummy calls from the back door to say it’s time for television, time for Crackerjack. I keep quiet and snuggle my cheek against Scrunchie’s warm, velvety ears, wondering if Daddy’s been too amorous, whether Mummy will let him visit us when the time is right.

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Brumation | Melissa N. Vincel

December, my son’s grandmother dies, so I take him to clean out her closet. 

I grab her purple coat, shut the door, head to trample woods behind her house. From a log, I pry fallen shards and spy a brittle wood frog, forearms frozen in tiny prayer to leaf litter, unblinking lids retracting into its skull. 

My son whimpers, so I explain it’s only a half-death, amphibian magic trick, superpower blood pushing against winter’s dark. It’s just a waiting game in the wooded shadows. 

His child ears are only four years old so he hears nothing but flakes melting. His mouth is only four years old so he stutters afraid to d-d-die, not g-g-g-good at s-s-s-still. 

The stutter worsens. By January, my neighbor can’t understand him. By Valentine’s, his teacher offers social-emotional sessions. I begin the worry, wonder how other women balance dying parents and not ruining children. 

We try speech therapy, dentist, chiropractor. Even Mama comes out five syllables. Sometime in March, I dream the purple coat striding over a cracking lake. I wake to pull it from a box. I drape it over the dining room chair and announce Mimi is eating with us now. 

We hold each other before meals from then on, one sleeve each grasped by my hand and his, a circle of human flesh and wool. We tell my mother’s coat about the day, fill her pockets with plastic dinosaurs, and sniff air around the notched collar. 

May, the ground thaws. I begin the dig to bury her ashes under the birch. Halfway through the task, my son creeps from the porch. He is a spray of violets moving across the ground. He is pond ice tinkling into warming water. He stands by my hip taller than the branch he swung on last fall, chin pinkening, tears warming his tongue into a clever thing again. 

We drop the ashes into the hole together. Words fall cleanly from his mouth, water the earth like prayers. My hands clasp in awe of moving things, of turning earth, of his hopping legs reborn. 

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The Taste of Absence | Bethany Bruno

My father drank black Maxwell House from a repurposed Big Gulp cup, the kind with a faded NASCAR logo and a plastic straw he never used. Every morning, long before the world stirred, he filled it to the brim and cradled it between his knees as he drove to work. No cream. No sugar. Just heat, grit, and something close to devotion.

He called it fuel, though he never rushed through it. He sipped slowly at red lights, windows cracked even in July, letting the scent of burnt coffee mix with wet palm air and the steady hum of morning sprinklers. The South Florida sun always rose early, golden and mean, but he met it with caffeine and stubbornness.

On weekends, he used the “Grumpy” mug I bought him when I was twelve. We were at Disney World, sweating through a heat advisory, and I picked it out with the kind of glee only a child feels while gift shopping. Grumpy had always been his nickname. He was famously irritable before his first sip of coffee, muttering through breakfast like the day had personally offended him. 

The mug was heavy, white ceramic, with Grumpy’s furrowed brow and crossed arms printed on the side. I wrapped it in tissue paper and held it behind my back like I had smuggled treasure. He drank from it for years, even after the handle chipped and the cartoon face faded to a ghost of itself.

He died in 2016. Six months from diagnosis to gone. Cancer took his voice first, then his appetite, then the rest. His work boots stayed by the door. His Big Gulp cup stayed on the counter. Some mornings, he still made coffee, but by the end, it was mostly untouched, the steam rising while he slept through the daylight. The bitterness outlasted him.

Since then, I have tried every method of coffee making. French press. Pour-over. Chic glass carafes with wooden collars. None of them feels right. They are too clean, too careful. They don’t know what it means to keep going. The smell of Maxwell House from a plastic tub still carries more weight than any hand-picked Ethiopian blend ever could.

Each morning, I make coffee. I press the button and wait. I listen for the sputter, watch the steam curl into the quiet. I pour a cup and drink it black.

It is not good coffee.

But grief has a way of anchoring itself in the ordinary. It clings to routines, disguises itself as habit. Sometimes I open the cabinet just to look at the Grumpy mug, still tucked behind the others, its handle glued back together with a crooked seam. I never use it. I am afraid the crack will not hold. I am more afraid it will.

Love, when it lingers, finds its voice in the bitterness. It slips into the places we thought we had cleared out. I drink, and he is there.

Still warm. Still rising.

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Chia Shower Pet | Crockett Doob

No, it was just that Cora told me how you put chia seeds in water and drink it and it’s good for you and I was pliable enough at the time to try it but I’d stopped–it’d been years and I forgot all about chia seeds but when Ricki gave me Ray’s half gallon jug–“he says it makes smoothies taste too gummy”–I wanted to do it again and the muse struck and I thought this time I’d do it with herbal tea, but I forgot how I got the seeds in the bottle so I figured I better buy a funnel but when I cleaned it, I didn’t think to dry it so it was wet in the middle when I put the seeds in so they got stuck there in these clumps, and I didn’t have any chop sticks–I always forgot to ask–and what else besides chop sticks could get in the hole but then I thought, the shower head (the water gun setting) and I tried it and it worked, nailing the middle of the funnel, blasting the seeds out and I made my chia drink, finally, with herbal tea, and it looked beautiful and red and I made a video for Cora and so all was well; but then I was in the shower, a few days later, whatever it was, and I noticed a little plant coming out of the drain, and it was too much, like my apartment’s already on the edge, my Draino-addicted sinks, outside on the street, “our local puddle,” as I call it, which is like a car-sized puddle (two car-sized) that never goes away, all year long, this nasty green/brown puddle, and I live by the beach and sea levels are rising and I was like, and now I have plants sprouting out of my drain, but then I realized it was just a chia pet. 

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Rocks | Mk Smith Despres

I wake up from a dream in which my daughter faces a small social injustice, but she is in 7th grade, so all of it is huge, really. In the waking world, I have watched her step back from her eyes and hold disappointment on the tongue like a cold rock. Swallow it. I cannot go back to sleep without seeing the dream where she is alone on the bus, so I cannot go back to sleep. 

In the waking world, she asks for pajama pants for Christmas so she can wear them to school. So she can go cozy up the front walk, the one where she saw her friend last week, neck red and swollen with trying and trying and trying. So she told, right away she told. The friend went home. Went somewhere. And she went to class. Swallowed rocks. Took a math test. 

Instead of sleeping, I play a game on my phone. Pour colored sand onto colored sand like those bottles on the boardwalk, but no one can shake these ones up. They are fixed in blue light and glass, and there is even a go back button. That go back button is the best. Just an arrow that tells you exactly what it means and does exactly what it says. My daughter didn’t know what it meant when, three days later, a different friend texted I want to kms. So the friend told her. And she told me. Swallowed. dw said the friend. Translation: don’t worry. She does.

I write my own hurt across every one of hers, but try not to let her read it. I don’t tell her don’t worry but I also don’t hold my rocks as well as she does. I never could. We cannot go back to before she knew her friends wanted to die, and didn’t. But we can go back to the river. And when her little sister digs and asks if sand can become rocks again, she starts to say no, but then looks at me and asks, Can it? Can you believe that under so much pressure, something can become whole again? Yes.

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Golden Hour in the District of Columbia | Noah Lane Browne 

It is late afternoon in late summer, the golden hour as everyone here calls it, as horizontal sunlight turns white marble monuments of war and history into shades of amber, softening Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian lines with warm hues, mellowing the capital’s imperial tone, when because the air is less suffocating at least for now and because you are feeling stronger at least for now, you unwrap your headscarf and pull on your wig, adjusting its fit in the mirror, and we walk to the beer garden and sit at a wooden picnic table under a white umbrella that says Weihenstephaner and I order a pilsner and you order a Coke, no ice, because you don’t understand why Americans are obsessed with ice given that the Coke is always plenty cold already and when I’m halfway through my beer I use the restroom and when I come back you nod towards a young man a few picnic tables over (young man being my words not yours and maybe a bit condescending or something my grandmother would say, what I really mean is just some guy) who had strutted over to you while I was peeing and flirted with you and tried to pick you up (there I go again, strutted being my word not yours and which implies an arrogance or douchiness that may not be fair, what I really mean is that he just walked over to you) and with dark brown eyes wide and playful you whisper He didn’t even notice I am bald! and you are grinning and actually now I am too because your illness has vanished from the world and its strutting young men and everything feels normal again, at least for a golden hour.

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Accompanying photo by Simon Fitall

Murder Most Foul, Murder Most Unsolved | Gregory Ormson

It’s desolate land, surrounded by the seven sacred mountains of the Apache, where the large mural of Emily Pike is painted on the town’s water tower. If you listen, you’d swear the wind is murmuring in grief. Listen again.

San Carlos is a two-hour drive east of Phoenix. The freeway overpasses are adorned with desert nature scenes and shapes. It’s out there, where wind-whipped clouds and bright skies hold secrets of crime and punishment, out there beyond purple mountains majesty and places with genteel names like Silly Mountain, and Gold Canyon.

The light-red, copperish desert bakes this hot day, broken and beautiful in a hard cactus kind of way; we sit on hard rocks in commemoration. A chain link fence keeps us back from the water tower. 

Flowers, stuffed toy bears, tobacco pouches, and messages are braided into the fence. Cloth pouches and poems on paper flutter at the false binary of chain links as wind blasts me into discomfort. “Apache Strong,” in large letters accompanies the image of Emily, painted silhouettes of Geronimo and his warriors hover near her.

Two people come by and hang on the fence for a minute. Somehow, on this hard rock, I am ok with just sitting. It reminds me of the day I sat on a hard chair reading Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky wasn’t Apache, but I can see it, A’tse I Bashanzhe’ except Apache has no word for punishment. Bashanzhe’ means whip or to whip.

There’s still no whipping for this crime, no incarceration either. Wrongs on every side of this manufactured split, a chained fence inside the bigger fence called “The Reservation,” inside a bigger fence called America.

On the ground nearby, broken whiskey bottles and beer cans, dirty testaments to bad history in trade. I’m bothered by the fences, by broken whiskey bottles, by this crime and no whipping for the brutal murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old. 

Yes, the red wheelbarrow matters, but the water tower and portrait of Emily, surrounded by many red handprints, also matters. So matters another broken and beautiful child of the land.

There is no on-the-fence . . . in this story . . . all I want to do is walk to the tower and place my palms there, right next to the red painted palm prints of all her relations. But the cruel fence sings a stop sign in the wind. 

And the wind in its bashanzhe’ is rattling and comforting: poems fluttering, prayers singing, flags and tobacco prayer bundles doing what they do. Wind whips it all up. 

Tears come from forever and 
take root 
here 
in this grief of nations
carried on the wind and
braided into
chain 
links 
“Justice for Emily.” 

Fourteen-year-old Emily Pike’s dismembered body was found on the San Carlos Apache Reservation on February 14, 2025. As of today, there is no arrest and no punishment.

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