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In the front seat, the driver and her sister keep up a meaningless chat, trying not to overhear but hoping, yes, please, to overhear. In the back seat, their eighty-two-year-old mother cuddles and whispers with her new beau as dusk descends. They have all spent the day in Florida’s Everglades, where they kept a watchful eye on crocodiles lurking near the surface of the brackish wetlands. Now, steering through the softening twilight on the hour-long trip back to Boca Raton, the driver glances in the rearview mirror at her mother and the sweetheart, their gray heads touching. Widowed for six years, the mother is soon to marry again. She and her eighty-six-year-old fiancé know about the gossip swirling around them, the smirks hiding behind the well-wishes. Friends have issued blunt challenges to the woman, heedless of the hurt their words might cause. _You’re desecrating your dead husband’s memory._ _A lot of women wouldn’t marry an eighty-six-year-old man._ _Why not just keep it a friendship?_ But now, in the back seat, they talk about their happiness. And then one word rises above the murmurs. “Orgasm.” The sisters’ conversation skids to a stop, and they share a sideways glance. Their mother said that word. The driver keeps her eyes on the darkening highway ahead. She thinks about a Saturday morning when she was fourteen and helping her mother change the sheets. “What’s a French kiss?” she asked. By then the daughter had had her first kiss, a memorable meeting of lips but no more. Probably she had heard the term at school and had some inkling of its fun naughtiness. Now she was pushing, testing to see what her mother, who had told her nothing about the exquisite intimacy of bodies, might share. Her mother stroked the crease of the sheet, folding it just so over the top of the blanket. “You don’t need to know that,” she said. * * * **Sheri Venema** ’s nonfiction has appeared in _Pithead Chapel_ , _Emerge Literary Journal_ , _Coal Hill Review_ , _Art in the Time of Covid-19_ (San Fedele Press), and _Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids_ (Eerdmans Publishing). Her travel writing and feature stories have been published in _Baltimore Magazine_ and _The Washington Post_. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and a dog named Raven. Find her on Facebook at facebook.com/sheri.venema. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🚗👂edited by Hattie Fletcher; 👵💕👴 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 💬 👀 designed by Anna Hall; and 🛣️ 🌅 delivered to our 2,779 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ****PS/**** We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. See the submission call → ### **From the archive** Jun 11, 2025 “Twin A and Twin B” by Brad Snyder | Specks of hope. Jun 12, 2024 “The Blue Phone” by Ghazala Datoo O’Keefe | A private line. Jun 14, 2023 “When You Measured the World” by Robert Erle Barham | A father’s memories. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * * We’re looking for flash nonfiction reprints. Guidelines →

Right now my biracial three-year-old thinks Africa is a place he can find on an old laminated map of the Bronx. He knows what a flag is but not what it’s for. He doesn’t know what it means when, after leaving a park on the outskirts of my family’s hometown in North Carolina, we see an oversized pickup truck sporting two Confederate flags, one at each corner of the cab. I don’t know what it means, either. When I was growing up, a white mother with a biracial child might push the child’s head down at a stoplight to avoid getting hassled. My olive-skinned grandfather used to tell me a joke about God having burned black people in the oven. White people, apparently, were underdone. Black people: burned; white people: half-baked. Got it. My son’s first words to me this morning after opening his eyes: _Prove it_. In the past two days, he’s become very excited about the Indian buffet; the concept of gravity; his sense of sight (_I’m using my sense of looking! Look out!_). Pulling up to the Indian buffet, he lets out a series of yells. _Are you excited about life?_ I ask. _Yes!_ he replies. _How does it work?_ This morning, at the breakfast table, he says something that sounds like “free bird,” so I start singing Skynyrd to him, the words I know, which are not many. He turns his face to the window then, the sun illuminating the traces of paint on his face I thought I’d washed off after yesterday’s art project. He bares his teeth in some semblance of smile plus warrior grimace, keeping his eyes closed even after the song has ended, taking a sun bath. Finally he opens them and looks at me, holding my eyes with his own while telling me about it. _I took up the sky._ * * * **Joanna Penn Cooper** is the author of a book of lyrical prose vignettes, _The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis_ (Brooklyn Arts Press); the poetry books _What Is a Domicile_ (Noctuary Press) and _Crown_ (Ravenna Press, winner of the Cathlamet Prize); and several chapbooks, including _Wild Apples: A Flash Memoir Collection with Writing Prompts_ and _Celebrity Ghost: Comics_ , both from Ethel Zine & Micro-Press. Her next full-length book of prose and poems, _When We Were Fearsome_ , is forthcoming from Ethel in 2027. She lives in Durham, NC, with her impish 13(!)-year-old and a cat named Oz. Find her on Substack at _Muse with JPC_. This essay first appeared in Talking River Review (2017). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🗺️ edited by Hattie Fletcher; 💬 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 👀 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was ☀️ delivered to our 2,761 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 21, 2025 “Celebration #50: August 2010” by Barry Maxwell | A birthday toast. May 22, 2024 “Parable” by Matthew Harkins | Strangers on a train. May 24, 2023 “My Sister Used to Give Me Blank Journals for My Birthday” by Beth Ann Fennelly | She knew I’d need them. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Two miles inland from the mouth of the Kennebec River, where the waters swirl a brackish dance between the rhythmic tidal pressures of the Atlantic Ocean and the steady push of watershed draining out a wedge of central Maine, on the granite flanks of the eastern shore, there stands an ancient cedar tree. This tree is not tall, but it is massive: four or five muscular trunks rising out of a common base of braided roots gripping a low rock ledge just above the high-tide mark. Behind the tree, furry thickets of scarlet sumac bushes slowly fill a clearing, and beyond them a pine-lined ridge heaves up to stand sentinel over this stretch of river. To the west, across a half-mile expanse of water, the postcard-perfect hamlet of Phippsburg nestles under a similarly rugged ridge, a cluster of gray-shingled saltbox houses around a pristine white church spire. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I sought out this cedar tree for solace, trudging down a mile of gravel road through copses of young beech trees and older hemlock groves, past the mysterious void of an abandoned cellar hole rimmed with ferns, through the sumac-studded field to the river’s edge, where the cedar tree’s trunks arced upwards from their common base like fingers curling loosely over an upturned palm, draped in fine, moss-green foliage. Many times, I climbed down into that beckoning hand to cuddle into its sinewy curves, laying my cheek on its fibrous bark. I would lie there late afternoons, watching the sun sink low toward the far riverbank, casting a rosier glow as it approached the horizon, its rays refracting through the lower swaths of atmosphere to reflect off Kennebec waters and angle up into my cradled hideaway, warming my face for a lingering while. I carried heavy, preteen boy feelings in my heart in those days, and being a boy, I couldn’t share them with any other human, or even give them dimension, or a name. I knew the feelings were large and steeped in loneliness, shaped by the presence of familiar people who acted out in ways beyond my understanding. There was the girl in my sixth-grade class I wanted to love, but she scorned me. There was my mother, who seemed to carry her own particular weight of sadness around with her, and though she tried to put on a good face and keep a good household and say appropriate motherly things to me and my brothers, she would sometimes be pulled under by her feelings, lost in herself. There was my father, who worked hard to meet his responsibilities at the hospital and care for his patients, always a pager-beep away from another crisis, who threw off subtle signals that he would like to be more kind and loving but didn’t quite know how to express that desire. I sensed, too, that somewhere, secrets were being kept from me. Boys weren’t supposed to have these wallowing feelings; they were just supposed to take actions and execute them competently, stuff like math and soccer and, later on, interpreting electrocardiograms and assessing heart murmurs and writing research grants; do them all without complaining much or feeling the ache of not being loved enough. Curled up in the cedar’s roots, aligning my youthful bones with its ancient contours, I could feel my heartaches settle, dilute, seep down into the organic mass of the tree. I imagined the tree absorbing them gently, along with the stream water that trickled down the riverbank, and the moisture from the waves of fog that sometimes rolled inland. I felt secure, held by this living being who had remained serenely rooted to one quiet ledge for centuries, growing incrementally in wisdom, bearing witness to the intersections of ocean and river, land and sky, a small boy and his unknowable fears. The tree didn’t require anything of me beyond my tiny warmth and weight on its roots; it loved me unconditionally through those baffling young years, and when twilight spread across the river and first stars began to ride the rippled waters, I could uncurl myself from its cupped embrace and make my way back up the gravel track toward dinner and home, less afraid of all I couldn’t yet see. * * * **Robbie Gamble** ’s nonfiction work has appeared in _Consequence_ , _Pangyrus_ , _Pithead Chapel_ , and _Tahoma Literary Review_. His essay “Exit Wound” was cited as a Notable selection in _The Best American Essays 2020_. He is the poetry editor for _Solstice Literary Magazine_ , and he divides his time between Boston and an apple orchard in Vermont. This essay first appeared in Tahoma Literary Review (2020). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 👦 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🌳 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🌳👦 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🌳👦💭 delivered to our 2,757 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 14, 2025 “Sitting at the island in my kitchen” by Margaret Rozga | Conjuring worlds. May 15, 2024 “Haunted” by Steph Liberatore | How soon is too soon to panic? May 17, 2023 “Men Seeking Men” by Will Howard | Everyone’s looking for something. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

_I wasn’t good at ponytails or braids_ ,__ Mom says, lifting a freshly rinsed chicken from the sink and laying it on an expanse of foil, _but this I do well_.__ She wraps a just-right length of string around the wings, ties an elegant knot—precise as the surgeon she might have been if she hadn’t decided the hours were incompatible with kids. I’ve tried telling her the ponytails weren’t important, that it all worked out anyway because my sister was good at hair, but decades later, she still apologizes as she pins the thighs to the body with the poultry needles that live in the top corner drawer. She ties another knot around the legs. Her ring waits on the windowsill. I wonder if she struggled with braids because I struggled with sitting still and smiling for photographs. As if she is the daughter, I hate to think of her eyeing absurd standards, feeling she doesn’t measure up. Mom sets a lemon in what remains of the bird’s throat and seals the flap of skin with another needle, another deft loop of string. How much of motherhood is simply holding things together? I don’t ask. The lemon is because I love their smell. I love the warmth in the kitchen, but I remain unconvinced by the myth that motherhood is good for women. I watch her run a final needle under the chicken’s backbone. _The trick is not to puncture your own finger_ ,__ she tells me. At nearly forty, I remain in awe of her competence, which is perhaps another myth, one I am letting her teach me as I finally learn to cook flesh. I follow her instructions to fit the rack over the bed of peeled vegetables, to grease it ever so lightly. She lowers the chicken into its cradle and I squat the roasting pan into the oven for her. It’s easier to obey now than it was at fourteen; it’s a strange, raw thing to honor a mother by not becoming one—to accept the slippery weight of the freedom you’ve been handed. I hold the platter steady, later, to catch the roast as she turns it off the rack. It’s absolutely a kind of witchcraft how perfect the chicken turns out—witchcraft and the patience to let it rest undisturbed for nearly an hour after cooking. The lemon is still whole and bright when we pull it from the bird. * * * **Ceridwen Hall** is a poet and educator. Her books include _Acoustic Shadows_ (Broadstone Books) and _The School for Danger and Other Studies_ (forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2026). Other work has appeared in _TriQuarterly_ , _Pembroke Magazine_ , _The Cincinnati Review_ , _Craft_ , _Poet Lore_ , and other journals. You can find her at www.ceridwenhall.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🍗🚰 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 💍🪟 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 🍋🪡 designed by Anna Hall; and 🧅🥕🥔 ⏲️ delivered to our 2,757 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 30, 2025 “Small Town Boy” by Mark Hendrickson | He was different. May 1, 2024 “Aint Brittany” by Brooke Champagne | Some bodies are built for flight. May 3, 2023 “Changing Lanes” by Mimi Schwartz | Just keep swimming. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

A few years back, I was visiting my older sister at her college in DC, visiting with my parents, who wanted to hit the bars with their daughter, as their parents had done with them, as any good parents do, while I went to see a movie; at the time, I was very much into film, and although I am still very much into film, back then I had tried to get into the habit of scrawling little notes in this little notebook that I had specifically for this purpose, specifically for scrawling little notes during movies, that is, and my parents dropped me off at the theater for a 10 p.m. screening of a documentary I had never heard of or seen playing anywhere else, called _Carol Doda Topless at the Condor_ , which I was very excited for, since I always tried very hard to see the nichest, strangest stuff playing when I was in a new city, stuff I couldn’t see anyplace else—and having seen it now, I can tell you how strange it is, this documentary about Carol Doda, cocktail waitress turned stripper who made international headlines in the 1960s for her act at the Condor Club in San Francisco, a club where she performed as the first ever public topless dancer in the US; Carol Doda, who famously began her act by being lowered onto the stage from the ceiling atop a hydraulic-rigged grand piano, a mechanism which would, in 1983, crush an assistant manager to death; Carol Doda, who would undergo a total of forty-four injections of silicone directly into her body, reportedly enlarging her breasts from size 34B to eventually 44DD, breasts which were insured for $1.5 million in today’s cash—and yeah, this film is certainly strange, but of course I don’t know this at the time, I don’t know a lot of things, I simply walk through the dreary little carpeted theater, my big, round cheeks stung from harsh DC winter winds, all the way to the screening room, and I see three extraordinarily dressed women leaning against the wall outside the room, smug and lording, in feather boas and headdresses and sparkling bodysuits and heels and gloves and garters and makeup and beads and sequins and fringe and anything and everything you can imagine, all in a line—a yellow girl, an orange girl, and a pink girl—and, mind you, this is the era of the Barbie movie, with people getting dolled up for the theater, so I just think to myself, _wow, this Doda lady must really be something special if people get this dressed up to go see her film at ten on a Friday night_ , and I walk past, intimidated by their gentle scowls and strong perfume, and I sit, in my frumpy knit sweater and thick, tiered, ankle-long skirt, in a seat just a few rows up from the screen, and I pull out my little notebook and write the date, time, title, and theater name at the top of the little page, and I wait, wait until the lights finally dim, and the trailers drag on and on, and then, finally, a voice erupts from the speakers and thanks me for being here and announces that “IN ORDER TO PAY TRIBUTE TO THIS ICON OF THE PAST, WE MUST HONOR THE DIVAS OF THE PRESENT,” and a spotlight blinks on and the three women, yellow and orange and pink, skin-stretching smiles plastered, come on out, strutting into the aisle, staring and pointing and gyrating and bumping shoulders up and down to the music, gesturing cheekily, slowly pulling gloves off with teeth, pasties revealed, garments tossed, strewn across the dirty grounds of the empty theater, all for an audience of one seventeen-year-old, frumpy, chubby, pimply little freakshow, pen and notebook in hand, speechless. * * * **Mia Carbone** is entering her junior year as an English and communications double major at the University of Pittsburgh. She likes movies and women. More on Instagram @mia.and.her.scraps. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 📽️ edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🎞️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 💃💃💃 designed by Anna Hall; and 📓 delivered to our 2,758 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 23, 2025 “Literally Any” by Jeanette Mrozinski | In search of hope. Apr 24, 2024 “Once, a Moon” by Karin Killian | The writing on the wall. Apr 26, 2023 “Whiting” by Deesha Philyaw | A story of six breakfasts. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Read carefully. Act FAST or lose EVERYTHING. We have INFORMATION you need. If you want to see the next TEN YEARS, follow directions. This is not a joke. Begin IMMEDIATELY. Walk thirty minutes three times a week. WE WILL KNOW IF YOU DON’T. MUSCLES are not optional. Lift weights even if you don’t feel like it. You IGNORED us before. Now your HIPS hurt. The fatigue is a MESSAGE. THREE meals, no excuses. Protein, protein, protein. Fruits. Vegetables. NO CHEETOS. If you disobey, there will be stomach ACID. In bed by TEN, no SCREENS after nine, or we keep you AWAKE. Read books you LOVE and quit BORING ones. Say YES to adventures. Say NO to people who stress you. Ten minutes of meditation. Daily. You may work alone or in a group. _Too busy_ is not a valid excuse. We will know if you say _tomorrow_. That’s when we ratchet up the knee PAIN. We will keep you from picking up your grandson. Stairs will be IMPOSSIBLE. Delay and you won’t open a jar. You won’t GET UP off the floor. You will be TIRED. Your deadline is NOT negotiable. We warned you before, and now we NEED your attention. PLEASE. We WANT you to carry your grandson. We WANT you to play piano. We WANT you to walk in the park. Begin NOW. Yours truly, Heart, Lungs, Muscles, and Mind * * * **Nancy Jorgensen** is a Wisconsin writer, educator, musician, and regular blood donor. She is the mother of a high school English teacher and the 2016 Olympic gold medalist in women’s triathlon. Her essays appear in HuffPost, Business Insider, _The Offing_ , _River Teeth_ , Wisconsin Public Radio, and elsewhere. Her most recent book is a middle-grade sports biography, _Gwen Jorgensen: USA’s First Olympic Gold Medal Triathlete_ (Meyer & Meyer Sport). Find her @Nancjoe on Instagram and at NancyJorgensen.weebly.com. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🚶‍♀️💪 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🥩🍗 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 📖📚 designed by Anna Hall; and 🛌 😴 delivered to our 2,773 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Jun 4, 2025 “Artifact” by Darien Hsu Gee | Faults and fractures. Jun 5, 2024 “Banana-Strawberry Smoothie” by Emily Chao | A first responder’s first loss. Jun 7, 2023 “Glazed Ham, April 1996” by Todd Kliman | A gleaming source of guilt. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Some beer-soaked dance floor in a bar outside Boulder. I’m twenty-eight or twenty-nine, wild inside a pocket of bodies and an I’ve-gone-away mind, lifting a sweaty bottle of two-buck beer above my head like a lantern. He’s watching from the crowd’s edge. Since he moved in months ago, I devise ways to disentangle, disappear. Distance has become a habit. Night after night, I sit on the end of a faded futon while he sleeps in the next room. I drink until the wine takes me down the back roads of bad choices, where I retrace missed exits, check my rearview for deleted messages and unanswered knocks on the door of my last apartment in Lubbock. In the dark, I stare at the snow-burdened trees outside our windows. Glass after glass after glass. One Saturday afternoon, I slip away to the patio of a pub, where I sip Chardonnay and listen to the skitter of leaves (brisk wind). He pulls up a chair. I pull a book from my bag. I have a history of this: _leave me be_. ~~~ It’s been years, almost twenty, and I remember how he and I moved in the dark—his chest against my back, the way I asked him to do it. The way my cries rang as loud as our neighbors’ wall phone upstairs. The way our neighbors shyly smirked at us most mornings. Those mornings he lumbered up the steps and ducked out the door on his way to work in those Carhartts, that beard. I’m thinking of this because a few nights ago, I fell into bed with a bearded stranger who wore Carhartts. That cotton gold like a lantern. It takes so little to take me back. It’s like that moment in Sarah Manguso’s _The Guardians_ : “I know it isn’t him, but when I see someone who resembles him I stare, take in as much information as possible.” So how much could I take in when I took him inside me? I can’t be the only one who sometimes moves in the dark with memory. I can’t remember my way around any city I’ve left behind. So much gone. I have a history of going, of going back, of thinking _go away,_ _go away,_ _go away_. Right now I’m sitting in the booth of a faded bar along a highway on my way back to Texas. I’m staring out a dusty window (wobbly table, sweaty bottle). Greyhound bus, UPS double-trailer, white construction truck, car, car, blue pickup, SUV, cement truck, semi, semi, semi. On the other side of the highway, trees bend in the spring wind. * * * **Jill Talbot** is the author of _The Last Year: Essays_ , based on her 2019–20 Paris Review Daily column. She’s also the author of _The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir_ and _Loaded: Women and Addiction_ , a collection of personal essays. Her writing has appeared in journals such as _Agni_ , _Brevity_ , _Gulf Coast_ , _Hotel Amerika_ , _LitMag_ , and _Southwest Review_ , and has been recognized seven times in The Best American Essays series. She has been a featured writer for Aquinas College’s Contemporary Writers Series, University of San Francisco’s Emerging Writers Festival, and The Literary Arts Institute at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, among others. Learn more at jilltalbot.net and on Instagram @jill.l.talbot. This essay first appeared in Brevity #62 (2019). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🍻 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 📖 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 💭 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🛻 delivered to our 2,767 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 28, 2025 “Crushed” by Wendy Fontaine | Young love, young heartbreak. May 29, 2024 “Pantoum for 1979” by Brenda Miller | Two steps forward, one step back. May 31, 2023 “Library with Hyacinth, Girl, and Guns” by Sue William Silverman | A still life. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

Let’s say your eight-year-old daughter is a climber: railings, fences, utility boxes. Let’s say trees are her favorite. Every June, when the mulberries ripen, she scales the branches and stuffs her cheeks like a hamster, returning with sticky purple hands and a grin. Let’s say her climbing makes your heart leap up your throat, so you have to swallow hard to stuff it back down. Let’s say your husband is a rigger and works at heights, and you’ve heard him teach her about safety—to keep three points of contact at all times, to look ahead to where she is going. He reminds you repeatedly to trust in him, to trust in her. But let’s say that even though you want to, you can’t help it: the vision of her slipping and falling strong-arms you every time she’s off the ground. So you tell her not to climb high. You tell her to come down. Let’s say that in your parents’ backyard, your daughter scuttles up a wooden post. Like a ladybug climbing a stalk, she scootches hands and feet, limbs nimble and swift. Your anxiety starts to climb, too. And let’s say your dad watches from his back porch, tight-lipped and frowning; you know his look of disapproval, ingrained from your own childhood. Let’s say that at the top of the wooden post, two wide and thick beams cross horizontally. Empty hooks at every end wait for baskets of red geraniums and purple and yellow pansies to be hung. Your daughter clambers to the top, her silver sequined shoes flashing, hand-me-downs from her cousin that she insisted on wearing. Let’s say she calls out, “Hi, Mama!” and waves frantically. You stop breathing with the thought she’ll throw herself off balance. She creeps across one beam on all fours. Rests her head and belly, lounging jaguar-like, arms and legs dangling. Like she’s warming in the sun. You can almost hear her purring. And let’s say your father steps closer. You know he’s about to say the kind of thing he said to you as a kid, with his voice low and stern, full of _be careful_ and _it’s too dangerous_. So often it became your voice. His limitations absorbed as your own. And let’s just say, you don’t want this for your daughter. Maybe you wave back at her. Maybe you turn to your dad, a hand on his shoulder. Maybe you tell him, “Hey, Dad, it’s okay. She can do this.” And maybe your daughter hears you say this, too. * * * **Lina Lau** is a green tea drinker, mother, and writer from Toronto, Canada. Her creative nonfiction appears in _River Teeth_ , _Hippocampus Magazine_ , _XRAY Literary Magazine_ , _Sky Island Journal_ , and elsewhere. She's currently working on a memoir of flash and fragmented essays exploring identity, motherhood, intergenerational connection, and raising her daughters differently than how she was raised. She owns too many notebooks and writes during the in-between moments of work and parenting. Find her on Instagram @_linalau_ and on Bluesky @linalau.bsky.social. This essay is a _Short Reads_ original. * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky This issue of __Short Reads__ was 🌳 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🧗‍♂️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; 💬 designed by Anna Hall; and 👋 delivered to our 2,762 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** May 7, 2025 “Orb Weaver Spider Catcher” by Krista Lee Hanson | Home-wrecker. May 8, 2024 “In the Absence of Hugs” by Rachel Furey | Things you can’t buy online. May 10, 2023 “Quick, Write Something” by Brittany Hailer | A monologue of early motherhood. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

It was Saturday at the indoor farmers market, and I was half awake as I stood in line for pickles. “Where are you from?” the vendor asked. My stomach clenched. It was soon after the Muslim ban in early 2017. I named a wealthy suburb (a true-enough answer), and then shame filled my belly. In this sea of white faces, his was brown like mine. He was probably just seeking connection, for where I was from before. I’ll never know. I took my quart of sour pickles and joined the crowd in search of the best loaf of artisan bread. * * * **Maya Benattar** is a music psychotherapist and writer. Her client work and writing focus on family stories, intergenerational trauma, and an inherited sense of “otherness.” More at mayabenattar.com and on Instagram @mayabenattar. This essay first appeared in Five Minutes (2024). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 🥒 edited by Hattie Fletcher; 🫐 fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🍅 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was 🍞 delivered to our 2,746 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 9, 2025 “Still” by Casey Mulligan Walsh | Knowing yet not knowing. Apr 10, 2024 “The Annual Bonfire, 1998” by Lynette D’Amico | Secrets in the smoke. Apr 12, 2023 “God Don’t Like Ugly” by Brian Broome | The bus bully gets schooled. Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *

My father once called from deep within his dementia and left a strange voicemail. Two minutes and seventeen seconds of rambling half-coherence, halting, alternating between an easy but nonsensical fluency and long pauses punctuated by his familiar cough, his laugh, as if he was pulling himself together, is still pulling himself together and out of the grave, clearing his throat. He laughed at himself as he failed to find the thread. Laughed again and said he had pictures of me as a kid that he couldn’t see because his macular degeneration turned them into a page of colors, a smudge that was once the image of his son. I assumed my stepmother told him what or who was in the photo. The owner of the face he knew he should recognize but couldn’t see. When and how and where the photo had been taken, the person or place captured. Or maybe he was holding a piece of paper, a takeout menu, nothing. _Hey, bud_ , he said, _are you on the slopes today?_ _Have you got a new ski outfit?_ I wasn’t. I don’t ski. One minute and thirty-seven seconds in, he grew lucid and told my voicemail that they—he and my stepmother—had passed the first test to get affordable housing in Toms River. He said it was near the shore, though he’d never been a beachgoer, spending our family vacations hunkered under an umbrella, nose in a book. Then his hopeful tone disappeared. Confusion and fear entered his voice, the whisper of it. He cleared his throat again, said, _I’m doing some downhill skiing. Won’t take too long_. He never skied but I wondered if he might be trying, through metaphor or allegory, to break out of his dementia to tell me something important. Some vital report from the front. I see him as he was then, all rickety fragility, looking closer to ninety than seventy, careening downhill, out of control, eager to hit the bottom and hoping it wouldn’t take too long. Maybe I _was_ skiing. Maybe we are all skiing. United in our descent, though he pulled ahead of me and finished his run five years ago—one jump, one turn really, an outline obscured by the falling snow. In the final years of his life, I received many of these calls. Voicemails with nothing but minutes of static, the sounds of fingers fumbling with the phone or the fabric of his pocket brushing against it. Voicemails with his familiar voice, almost steady, slow but intelligible, asking the usual questions, saying _hi_ and _take care_ and _call me_. I returned the calls and listened to my father butcher the plot of _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ or _GoodFellas_ or _The Last of the Mohicans_. His favorite movies, movies I’d seen with him a dozen times. I listened to him slowly get wrong the names of the actors, the director, the setting. And I humored him. As the plots unraveled, I almost wished he were right. That the movies existed as he remembered them, strange mishmashes of classics where a young Jack Nicholson escaped Nurse Ratched, joined the mob, and carried a musket on his way up the Hudson to the besieged British fort. I imagined my father imagining himself as a hero in the scene, hobbling after Jack, wearing a hospital gown and carrying a tomahawk, marching to the oddly fitting soundtrack of a Tony Bennett number, his smooth crooning echoing through the firs and ferns of colonial America as it echoes now through me. I couldn’t tell what was true, which of my father’s stories were new to me because his mind had shrunk and shaken loose older, hidden memories, like the apples we picked when I was a kid, the tiny, tart ones you could only reach with a basket on a pole or a ladder, or if he’d lost it completely toward the end. Was he bullshitting me like he used to, enjoying watching me struggle to decide how gone he was, to decide whether it was okay to laugh? At one point he told me he used to have lunch with Tony Bennett at a deli near Columbus Circle in New York in the seventies. My father had a job selling ties. There was a recording studio close to his office and Tony Bennett, hardworking showman that he was, spent his days recording and his nights performing at a nearby club. They could have crossed paths often enough there, two regulars meeting over soups and grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee, to chew and smoke and chat. My father couldn’t remember what they talked about but he said he used to call his famous lunchmate Anthony. I like to think of my father frozen in that memory, a choice scrap of meat in aspic. Something to come back to, to gnaw. A clean linoleum counter; hot, cheap coffee served in heavy, white chipped mugs; the smell of grease, of frying bacon and aftershave and cigarettes; the city bustling outside, the ties practically selling themselves. Maybe Mr. Bennett sings a tune or two. Or better yet, saving his voice for the studio but so full of song he can’t stay silent, he hums. My father, though tone-deaf, can’t resist it. Doesn’t want to. Full of something, he feels himself begin to hum. _Hey, bud_ , he always said. Said until he didn’t. Couldn’t. _Hey, pops_ , I say now to no one, waiting for a call that never comes. * * * **Kent Kosack** is a writer based in Pittsburgh. He has recent work in _Minor Literature[s]_ , _Heavy Feather Review_ , _3:AM Magazine_ , _Some Words_ , and elsewhere. His novella, _Adar’s Freedom_ , is available now through Subtle Body Press. You can read more at kentkosack.net. This essay first appeared in Tin House Online (2018). * * * ****Help keep**** _****Short Reads****_****going.**** Become a supporting subscriber or make a one-time donation. Share this essay on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Bluesky __Short Reads__ is 📱 edited by Hattie Fletcher; ⛷️ fact-checked and proofread by Chad Vogler; and 🎥 designed by Anna Hall. This issue was ☕ delivered to our 2,748 subscribers by Stephen Knezovich. ### **From the archive** Apr 16, 2025 “Pitch” by Rasma Haidri | Perfect. Apr 17, 2024 “Sour Grass” by Victoria Lewis | A taste of the unknown. Apr 19, 2023 “Recense (been looking)” by Patrick Madden | “An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure.” [Neil Peart] Explore the entire Short Reads archive. * * *