I have a pebble in my right nipple. Or a pebble-size something. I found it one night lying in bed, and as I rolled it around under one finger to determine the size, I went into auto defense: a little cyst, ...
Waiting by Caroline Sutton
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Over Thanksgiving, my mother tells me that wearing black casts illusions. At first, I hear that it makes one’s body look dimmer. Outside, the daylight fades from everywhere at once. The specific music of a Northern ...
Self Portrait as Candle Song by Cole Pragides
LAR Online, Nonfiction
I’m suspended in the chair, trapped in a staring contest with my own reflection. Joey moves around me with wordless precision, scissors glinting under fluorescent lights. I prefer the silent ones—stylists who treat ...
The Torture Seat by Chris Wu
LAR Online, Nonfiction
water will come again
if you can wait for it.
—Lucille Clifton, “water sign woman”
Mid-March: You wish for the late-winter rain that Seattle is famed for. You wish for all the water the Pacific Northwest can ...
DESIRE IS AN IAMB by Lauren Fath
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Both my grandparents died very young.
My mother thinks it’s because my grandfather would chain smoke in the greenhouse, creating a literal greenhouse effect where my grandmother constantly took in the secondhand ...
Practicing Dying by Rebecca Suzuki
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Two days before I flew to my childhood home in rural Assam, India, an unaccountable itch made me put off some last-minute tasks and rush over to Will Rogers State Historic Park, in the Pacific Palisades. The vast lawn ...
Love Letter to Will Rogers, from Assam by Grace Singh Smith
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Grandma Roberts has a secret. She tells me this as I’m lugging a jug of brown well water across the old cemetery while trying not to knock my shins against the stones. It is the summer of 2015, five years before she ...
Home to Ohio by Chelsie Bryant
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Heuston Street and Oppenheimer’s Cottage
The last lines of The Living and the Dead about snow falling on the living and the dead are painted, in pastel letters, on an electrical box in downtown Dublin; I saw them last ...
2024 Creative Nonfiction Award Winner: Rebecca Pyle
Award Winners, Nonfiction
This small town, the place where I grew up and occasionally return to, is beautiful, but dull. When I am away, I long for the town’s routines, which, as a teenager, bored me: the boats lowing in the morning; the fog ...
California Romantics by Becky Peterson
LAR Online, Nonfiction
