Nonfiction – Issue 4

I always want to write about my mother’s hands. Her veins bulge, green and purple beneath her skin, and sometimes when she’s tired they travel up her wrists like garden snakes . . .

Smell of sweet olive. Picking satsumas, kumquats, lemons, whatever overhung the sidewalk. Japanese plums from the tree in front of the house . . .

I involuntarily recall a story I heard on NPR. A group of boys rape a 12-year-old girl. In an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods. At a summer camp . . .