The Monthly Theme Essays are a collection of essays written each month on a predetermined theme. These essays are always published during the last week of the month. To submit a Monthly Theme Essay check out our upcoming themes.
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My mother’s eyes registered my arrival, but without her dependable smile. The bones of her face were sharp and craggy, her nose slightly humped from a childhood fall, her eyes blue and deeply set. Tita, who cared for her, had dressed her in her brightest blouse and hung a necklace round her neck. Mom was crooked in her chair and not pretending, while a cheerful string of rainbow-colored letters on the mantle shouted happy birthday for her eighty-ninth and last.
Read More“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”
We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.
Read MoreWhen my ex-husband told me his father was dead, he said it casually. The way you'd mention an alma mater, or that you'd lived abroad for a while.
"My dad died five years ago," he said. We were at work, in a courtroom with no privacy, dressed in our lawyer suits. He reached down to tug up his socks when he said it. I remember searching for significance in how he announced his tragedy while adjusting his outfit. It made me wonder if his father's death was an easy thing to bear. Or if it were so painful he needed to reveal it in the bright bustle of a courtroom, with busied hands. He usually seemed so guarded.
Read MoreThe platter was lovely. It was a vintage looking black and white interpretation of a sea turtle on melamine. The species was a Kemp’s Ridley. Despite being the rarest and most endangered sea turtle in the world, it is the most common turtle to see stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod.
Read MoreWhen I realized that I probably shouldn’t be there, at your funeral, it was too late to leave. I was sitting alone in the center of a cushioned pew halfway back, picking at my cuticles in my lap, too self-conscious among strangers to put my fingers to my mouth and chew. The little chapel was sparsely filled. It seemed I was one of the few who’d found out about the service, or else, perhaps no one was meant to come who had not been asked. When I arrived, I had expected a large crowd to disappear into, or perhaps an old classmate to cling to, but neither were found. I had not gotten in line, to file past where you rested. Instead, I ducked into a pew and sat down, to hide, to gather my thoughts, wonder if I should leave or stay, try to shake off the feeling of a spotlight on my back. Being there felt like some kind of transgression, though I only meant to pay respects.
Read MoreTucked between the food-stained pages of my old Betty Crocker cookbook is a handwritten recipe for meatloaf. It’s written on the back of a menu from Gustaf Anders, the Swedish restaurant in Southern California where my stepbrother, John, once waited tables. It was 1992, I think, and John and his Norwegian wife were in the middle of a divorce. Or maybe it had already happened. We were drinking a lot and smoking weed in those days. We had flown back from Norway together, drunk for the entire fourteen hour flight from Oslo to Los Angeles, with a stopover in New York for Customs. I think it was New York; I was in a brownout then. The valium and booze had performed their customary magic. What I remember: putrid green cinderblock walls and men in uniforms. Our bags were screened and some item was questioned and we almost missed the connecting flight. We reeked of Marlboros and sweat and Kahlua. We’d drunk the liquor cart dry.
Read MoreI rush to the quai in the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Flinging my small case on the train, I jump on. Moments later the train pulls away along the track, heading to Nice.
Slumped in my seat, I can relax, breathe, and observe those already settled in my compartment. Business people, couples, and single travellers surround me. One small figure catches my eye—a lady in her early sixties, dressed in a double-breasted camel hair coat, green beret, and smart brown leather gloves. She is elegant, with red lipstick. The slight nervousness of her fidgeting hands is familiar.
Read More“I’m done,” says Leigh, her voice full of defeat. But she’s angry. There’s always anger.
I heave a sigh, and my shoulders slump. “I think I am, too.”
My eyes are puffy and red, my nose feels like it’s clogged with cement. I need some Advil. And a drink.
Read MoreThe week I got back home to New York after spending my junior year of college in England, two unexpected things happened. I got a phone call offering me an internship in Manhattan that I’d been rejected for months earlier and my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Read More“Did she really say that?” I was shocked, yet I wasn’t. There was a strange quality to my awareness those days, like the water coming to shore and retreating again. I was listening to myself through insubstantial headphones, muted and tilted slightly.
My mama nodded. She kept tinkering about the kitchen, pressing the button on the coffee machine and side-stepping back to the sink. I watched her in silence for long moments, dangling my feet from the bar stool with the nervous energy that took hold of me while I was mulling over my grandmother’s statement.
Read MoreOn the day that you, fifteen, tell your mother you are sorry for saying words that hurt her, you will stand on the bottom tread but one of the hush-carpeted stairs that run through the middle of the two-story house. She will stand in the doorway to the blue dining room, which leads to the kitchen from which you’ve called her. She will furrow her brow, tilt her head, and say Thank you for saying that, then look down and wring her hands, or maybe a kitchen towel. Next, not meeting your eyes, she will heft a hurt into the air, heavy under the weight of double negative: This doesn’t mean you’re not still grounded.
Read MoreA funeral is an elementary school gym. The same gym where, in the evenings, you memorize the faded lines that mark the borders of the volleyball court, the gym that you and your ten-year-old teammates sneak away from to peek into the boys bathroom, to see if it really is bigger than the girls (“It is!” you squeal, waving over the other girls to see for themselves). The gym where your P.E. teacher sets out little black X’s on the floor to mark each kid’s spot. “Don’t move from your place,” she says, so you sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, even on the day that you sob all through class because you got in trouble for forgetting to write your name at the top of your multiplication test.
Read MoreHasbun Allahi wa nimal wakeel. These words had become my mantra. “God alone is sufficient for us, and He alone can rectify our affairs.” These were the words that I would recite thousands of times a day that winter. I would repeat this phrase in the early morning hours when I couldn’t sleep. As I heard myself murmur the words, my own voice seemed to lull me into a trance-like state, as if I floated out of my body.
Read MoreI was next to my father in the back of a police cruiser as the resentment towards my mother grew. I was six months pregnant and when I realized that the door locked from the outside, echoes of my doctor’s voice flooded me. You have to remain calm when you’re pregnant, eat well, play music for your baby to hear in the womb. They internalize your emotions in utero and can be traumatized before they are even born. I tried to breathe as I looked ahead through the grates that divided me from the backs of the policemen’s balding heads and put a hand on my hard misshapen stomach as I rolled my window down the two inches that it allowed.
Read MoreThe airplane skims over a monotonously beautiful carpet of lakes, clouds, forest, and fields. The Land of Midnight Sun (well, actually, one out of five possible Lands of Midnight Sun; each Nordic nation with its twenty-four hours of summer daylight technically qualified to claim the title) reveals itself to you in puffs of white, geometries of emerald, bowls of aqua. It’s only a matter of minutes before you land and have to start apologizing.
Read MoreAt a beach on Madeline Island, my son and daughter searched for skipping stones, flat and smooth, perfectly sized to fit their little hands. They would have been six and nine that summer. We had gone to the island to sightsee, a day trip to visit a friend of my husband who had retired there. She drove us to a quiet inlet tucked safely away from the mighty waves of Lake Superior, and there we walked across the rose gold sand and there we found the stones.
Read MoreI was seven when I ran past my mother and grandmother, who were talking about whatever two grown Black women talk about when no one else is listening, when the protrusions from under my tank top caught my grandmother’s attention. “Oh! She got milks,” she said in a confounded, awe-inspiring voice mixed with a bit of intrusion and knowingness. I was only seven.
Read MoreFor most people home is a house, at least in literal terms. It’s brick and mortar, floorboards, paint, and curtains. Maybe it’s where you’re born, where you raise your own family, or where you live with two of your best friends and a stray cat. It’s four walls and a roof that shelters you from the rain. It’s not that simple though, is it? Maybe home is a town or a city. Streets you can navigate on autopilot, familiar fish and chip shops, trees you used to climb and your footprints concreted into the sidewalk.
Read MoreSpecks of dirt and dust are nestled in the ridges of the soft carpet pressed against my cheek. The velvety surface wraps me in a layer of safety as I melt into it like a blotch of watercolor paint expanding gradually on paper. My little cousin, Pipe, lies next to me behind his father’s bass drum, one of the many musical instruments and loose items surrounding us. Past the instruments and piles of sheet music is an opening where light streams in from the Andean sky and into a plant-filled, pebbled courtyard.
Read More“Why are we here?” Karl asks and sinks back into the floral, wing-backed chair. His lower legs jut straight out of the seat.
“To dress Dad’s body for the viewing.”
I see Rob’s family arriving.
Ansel goes on a hunt for funeral home candy. Barely-a-teenager, he returns with slump posture and announces, “No candy!”
“Darn it,” Helena, my cheeky tween says, pretending to be angry. She gauges Ansel’s woeful expression and laughs.
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