The picture-taking portion of the evening was a serious affair. We allotted at least an hour for it, as if we were working with professional photographers and not our parents. Parents, who were dutifully snapping pictures of their daughters. Daughters, who at 16 had fa...
The heater blasted on high, fogging up the windshield. The lingering image of the dream I’d just woken up from still played in my head as I shivered in the car, in the dark. The clock on the dashboard glowed 5:21 A.M.
My mother was lying on the couch looking up at the rafters when I entered my parents’ 600-square foot cabin in north central Mississippi. I could not remember ever having seen her lie on that couch. I stepped directly to her side, dropped to my knees, immediately seei...
On January 1st, 2010, I wake up with two black eyes. I am thirteen years old, and three nights a week I walk to an Assemblies of God church a few blocks away...
I sat in the hallway outside my apartment on the fifth floor where I could catch the internet signal from my third-floor neighbors. They had given me the password, because they treated me like family, and having just started my third year in Beirut, I still did not kno...
