By: Lindsay Benster

The first thing grief steals is rhythm. The heartbeat stumbles. The pipes hesitate, unsure how to hold silence. Even the rain loses its measure, falling to a song it no longer remembers. They say water is cleansing, and maybe it is. But they forget what it demands. To stand in it. To feel the sting. To keep scrubbing at what will not wash away. Water carries memory. It circles the earth and comes back changed, each pass through sediment leaving remnants, each downpour mixing with pollutants, heavy with everything it’s touched. The same water that once carried ships through violent storms now tepidly trails down my cheek while I whisper I’m fine to no one. Tears are the body’s Morse code, a wet tapping from the inside. Mine spell please, stay, don’t make me learn how to live with this. They burn on their way out. Not metaphor. Salt meeting skin. Grief sterilizing what it ruins.

By: Grant Patterson

I looked up the definition of the word “synthetic” on Google. There’s the noun version, a synthetic material. As an adjective though, it describes “a substance made by a chemical synthesis, especially to imitate a natural product.” Google defines the word “soul” as the “spiritual or immaterial part of a human or animal and is regarded as immortal.”

By: Vaishnavi Pusapati

I do not remember when I began to write; I only remember the quiet before the words arrived—how they hovered, unformed, behind my eyes. Writing did not enter my life like a discovery, but like a return. It seeped in quietly, as though I had been waiting for it all along. Over time, I realized that the language I used to understand the world was also the one that would build me.

By: Martha Patterson

As kids, my middle brother and I fought all the time. It wasn’t really his fault – I was just his pesky little sister. And it wasn’t exactly my fault, either. I suppose it was just the same sibling rivalry that happens in any family. I’ve heard about it enough from friends and relatives. We weren’t, probably, too different from lots of brothers and sisters – always getting on each other’s nerves. And maybe my anxiety about our fractious relationship was an early sign of a mental health issue I developed later in life – schizoaffective disorder, characterized by sporadic delusional thinking, neurotic behavior, and psychosis.

By: Lamont Neal

An excerpt from the memoir, A Tree in a Storm (unpublished)

Paradise Found

Gallia County kept surfacing in my ancestry research, over and over. I had never heard of Gallia County before. I assumed it must be near Logan, Ohio, where my mother’s side of the family had roots. When I finally took the time to dig deeper, I was surprised to learn that Gallia County had once been home to a significant early African American community. That was something I had never heard growing up.

By: Dr. Jon Tilburt

Everything’s more casual out here in the West. The proximate parking, the summer-weight clothing, first-name basis with the CEO. Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

Wednesday, clinic day, I walk the halls with an apparent ease, like I’m comfortable in my skin, competent, experienced. My navy suit and bowtie around my neck. Pomade fixing my coiffed salt-and-pepper hair.

7:45 sharp, I rehearse my mantra at the door, rub sanitizer back and forth on my hands and knock, take a deep breath, peek my head in the exam room, and step into another’s story.

“Melissa, I assume,” I say, extending my hand. “Welcome to integrative medicine.”

By: Donna Faulkner

(A hybrid work of fiction with Creative Nonfiction)

“…Of course I was livid. They had bastardized American Gothic …but my lawsuit was thrown out. The judges claimed no one would have actually believed that those were my bare breasts on the cover of Hustler. But when I first saw it…” Nan clutched her chest, “it nearly gave me a heart attack.”

I’d worked at the retirement home for years, for as long as Nan had been here. I washed and helped Nan get dressed, carefully applied her cherry lipstick, and we chatted as I gently brushed her fine hair.