The tiny European car parked outside the window of Babu’s cafe in Zürich has a few droplets of water on the rear windshield. The people come and go around me, on and off like the intermittent rain. They move, and I sit. A few of them are coming into the cafe, maybe even to sit by the window with ...
Here the stars are bright and begging, like pennies at the bottom of a well. Here the trees are green, even in the heart of winter, for here the winter does not exist. Here I feel hidden, tucked away into a pocket of the night. We are so far from the city, from the lights, from the highway. It is the ...
cw: mentions of food anxiety and negative body image
Here are some words. Some are fabricated from words in different languages, some are molded from combinations of words long dead, and some are words that already exist to which I have given new meaning. Some are words that were reaching out with tantalizing fingertips, begging to be rescued from dusty ...
Trees in Rhode Island stand tall and thin, reaching toward the deep-blue sky with their spindly branches. From the window of a train speeding from Providence to Boston, I watch them stretch, toward the clouds, toward each other, standing proud and bare in the icy earth. On the CalTrain from my hometown ...
My mother used to give my sister and me glass hearts. The ritual was based on the book The Kissing Hand—the story of Chester Raccoon, who is terrified to start kindergarten. Throughout the story, his mother reassures him of the wonderful things he will discover at school, like friends, toys, and books. ...
It was not long after we met Valentina that we learned about the Coldplay dollar.
We are born into clumsy bodies. We flail around with fat fingers as we learn to make sense of the fuzzy shapes around us, and to assert important truths like “ba” and “ga.” As we grow, we are given a fuller set of words to wrap our hands around, including words that are supposed to describe ...
note: contains version translated into Spanish at the end.
When the lights come on, there is a single spotlight, trained on the center of the stage. The actress is there, basking, lounging in the glow. Her legs dangle off the edge of the piano, willfully uncrossed. Her hair is piled high atop her head into a mount of carefully aligned curls. She wears a fitted ...
There are the ones I left in a drafty room over a frigid New England December, only to come back from sun-baked California to their slouching, frozen corpses. The countless overwatered succulents, the root-bound vines, the pothos I just couldn’t make happy. The ones left forgotten, unwatered on my ...
Mysterious and alluring, it is one of the rarest creatures in the world. Only spotted on the most unlikely of nights, it constantly evades capture at the last minute, coming tantalizingly close before dancing away once again. Despite its slippery nature, it entraps the world's attention as its ...
Maybe I’m sitting at the dinner table, feeling the warmth of the tea mug and the crumbs on the tablecloth. My brother might be beside me, still eating—methodical as a surgeon. My mother is probably ribbing him for sleeping until the afternoon, and between bites, he defends himself: “It took ...
Solutions by The State News
