growing up

Window Blind

By Alyssa Jewell

Fall 2022

The white slap of the moon after hail gone through
ivy to silver April’s first green blades: There I listened

Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997

By Kaveh Akbar

Summer 2018

the waiters milled about filling sumacshakers clearing away plates of onion andradish my father pointed to each person whisperedPersian about the old man with the silver [...]

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Fat Swim

By Emma Copley Eisenberg, Illustrations by Lauren Nassef

Spring 2018

Alice spots the fat women through the second-story kitchen window. It’s Wednesday, so Dad is out at his feelings meeting. She has just turned eight and has been dragging her drumsticks over different household surfaces to see what sounds they make. The sink has been working well—a satisfying ting, ting, ting. Also the panes of window glass—higher, though, and more muffled. The kitten meows on the ledge. Shush shush, Alice tells him, then bops him lightly on the head with a stick.

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Trout

By Elizabeth Weld, Illustrations by Lauren Nassef

Spring 2018

Two years after her mother’s death, Jane’s boyfriend asked her to marry him, and nine months later, they moved across the country to start their new life. Jane was twenty-nine, ready to step away from Phoenix after a hard few years. Ryan had taken a job at a recording studio in Tennessee, and he pointed out that the public schools there were as bad as the ones in Arizona, so she could easily fail teaching fourth graders in either place. Her father was a kind, if distant, ichthyologist, and he seemed to think the move was maybe not ideal, but maybe not a bad idea. Jane was excited to start over. She’d been adopted when she was six, and she thought of six as the beginning of her real childhood. As they drove out of town, she decided twenty-nine was the beginning of her real adult life.

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Treasure Box

By David Leavitt

Fall 2014

The box dates from the late sixties, from a trip I took with my family to Ireland. I would have been eight or nine at the time. Of the trip itself I have one vivid memory. We are in a rental car, my father at the wheel, his attention focused vigilantly on the challenge of driving on the wrong side of the road.

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