It's been hot. Everything's hot. Global temperatures, national temperaments—even the bees that hover at the birdbath's edge are plunging into its waters, only to find them warmed by an unrelenting heat dome. What to do? Writers Resist offers a cool escape: Don a wet t-shirt, flop before a fan, and read this issue. In it, you'll [...]
By Penny Perry For my Aunt Leona Heyert Tarleton who died at age 33 We are looking at the mockingbird in the lemon tree. This is the first day of my cousin’s summer visit. I wriggle closer to her. “I know how my mother died,” my cousin whispers. The gazebo is the place for secrets. [...]
By Penny Perry June 5, 1942 Dear Isabel, I drove my sister to the doctor’s in Los Angeles. It all happened so quickly. I promised to bring her a chocolate phosphate when it was over. She joked with the nurses. Told them if she puked from ether she would buy each of them a pair of [...]
By Penny Perry Mother couldn’t have known what to do. She was only twenty-five, drove her big sister, Leona, six weeks pregnant to the doctor’s in L.A. Leona squinted at California bungalows, backyards with orange trees. She thought about her husband home worrying, her baby waiting for her. She told my mother about her screenplay, [...]
By Penny Perry She pulled up in her dented VW, twenty miles from her cockroach-filled kitchen. Five feet tall, wearing a three-dollar dress from Lerner’s. The dress long and black, looked expensive. N.O.W. had picketed the all male institute the year before. Marble floors. Carved wood staircases. Louis the 14th chairs. The study where one [...]
By Penny Perry “Make up should be for your husband only,” my mother says in my head. In real life, she is home in her apartment, blowing cool air on her second cup of tea, filling out her grocery list. “You don’t need a clock, you can tell time by the tasks she performs,” my father [...]
By Penny Perry Author's note: In August, 2008, Russian tanks and soldiers moved into the Republic of Georgia and killed 228 civilians. In March, 2014 under Putin, Russia seized Crimea. President Obama ordered sanctions against the Russians. Now, President Trump wants to remove the sanctions, and Putin wants to recapture the former territories of the Soviet Union. [...]
