by Avi Kramer When I arrived in Chaling on a steamy afternoon last August, I had expected rutted dirt roads sidelined by weathered telephone poles, a central meat and vegetable market, and embankments leading down to farm land and rolling hills. I was correct about the fields, acres of square plots, soggy rice paddies and…
by Jackie Sanders I am 40. You’d never know it if you looked inside my soul. You’d think I was 23, maybe 26 at the most. No, the only giveaway is my face, my body. The changes don’t happen all at once, they’re gradual, hardly noticeable, until all of a sudden, they’re very noticeable. I…
by Esperanza Elena Rodriguez Searching for Self on I-5 This was all new to me: being alone, without a husband. I was 38 years old and what I thought would last forever did not. I found myself single and felt as though I had no identity of my very own. For the past twenty years,…
Her sweet, babbling voice calls me in the morning. I long for her chill on my neck and her wet kisses on my lips. The lovely Tuolumne whispers to me memories of stargazing and river rafting. Laurence came into my life at the Fillmore Jazz Festival, it was a random encounter between two people who…
by Stephanie Block My grandmother was born in Shanghai, China, around the turn of the twentieth century. and she died before I ever got to meet her, choking on a fishbone in the middle of a dinner party in Oahu. Everyone’s jaws drop when I mention the countries that have hosted my fair-skinned, almond-eyed family:…
Rich Arabian nights and delicious jasmine days…it’s easy for a Diva to find solace in an Egyptian palace at the foot of the Great Pyramids. As the round, burnt-orange sun falls behind the rolling Egyptian sands, palm trees glow with the reflection of the day’s heat. It is 2004, and the same sun that set…
The lessons I’ve learned by flying solo The morning of my solo check-flight arrived with an unpleasant gusting 18-knot wind. I stood on the tarmac and surveyed the gusts, 2 knots faster would force me to cancel my check flight – the Cessna I flew could not handle 20-knot winds hitting the side of the…