Turtle brushes, running, and West Virginia
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
Drip
by Evan Joseph Massey
George Washington isn’t wearing a durag. This is my first thought when I pick up the quarter off the sidewalk on my way back from taking out the trash. I brought it close to my face, and the sun glinted off the copper-nickel, kissing George Washington’s Roman nose. His colonial wig, worn to make men appear older and distinguish classes, resembled, in that moment, a durag. The curls in the back cascaded like a braided tail flowing down his neck. Underneath the wig I imagined his real hair was rippling into presidential waves. Or maybe not. I’ll have to consult a scholar about that.
An Ode to the Kamenoko Tawashi, the Turtle Brush
by Katie Okamoto
Like most who could, the girl who’d become my grandmother escaped to the mountains, staying with relatives and returning to Hamamatsu City to work and find food on the black market. She had three younger siblings to support. By luck, she was not with her two older cousins when bombs fell one afternoon in October. By chance, she saw the boys the next morning at the hospital before they died. Or by luck, because they were almost unrecognizable.
The Grief Artist
by Traci Brimhall
I tear the hearts into pieces, dumping them into the blender strip by strip. Sometimes I peel the paper hearts apart around certain words, and other times I watch their shrinking geometry after each incautious rip. Then, I add water. Then, the loud whir of the blade turning the old love letters full of adorations and apologies into fresh pulp.
On Running
by Larissa Pham
None of it felt good, but after a while, it started to feel like nothing. It was this nothing I was after – the moment where the noise of my brain cut out and I crested onto that smooth, high plane of emptiness, empty of feeling, empty of thought, my body churning out its own high. It was a beautiful place to be, however briefly the feeling lasted – ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Once I reached that mark, I kept running, until my legs burned, until something inside me told me it was time to go home.
The Deep Connection of West Virginia’s Indian Community
by Neema Avashia
They are strangers in the strangest of lands, brought to the capital city of Charleston by engineer and doctor husbands who service the coal and chemical industries. The women spend the majority of their time in white, largely working-class spaces, trying to bridge the divide between their Indian accents and their neighbors’ Southern ones, their Hindu culture and the Bible Belt. Only on weekends and holidays do they find the opportunity to connect with others who share the same language, faith, and customs. A brief respite from a steady sensation of foreignness that pervades their day-to-day.
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