Category: Powerful Prose

A frigid blast of wind slashed my face, and I shivered, pulling my sweatshirt tighter around me. Despite the crisp, cold air, the June sun shone brilliantly, making the slick mountain ice glitter like diamonds. I could hear the other girls’ teeth chattering as we struggled up the mountain. By the time we stopped, they…

July.  Words are funny. You know what they mean, but you don’t truly know what they mean. A lot of words are flitting around the house today. Twins. Premature. NICU. Overdose. Accidental.   I didn’t even know my cousin was pregnant. Gwen’s not my cousin exactly. My dad’s cousin’s daughter, but that doesn’t matter. Not now,…

The wooden desk in his apartment sat cluttered with textbooks, a half empty water glass, and a stack of stamped envelopes. My dad was a lanky man with dark hair and tired eyes, sitting hunched forward. His pen was positioned right above a clean sheet of paper. Outside his apartment, the muffled hums of campus…

Going home for Anna was like rolling a die, the shiny acrylic clattering on weed-overgrown cobblestones as she walked up the path to her front door. The die rolled as she turned the doorknob, settling on a number as the brass cooled her palm and she breathed in, the mulch smell of the yard invading…

A life-changing adventure, a courageous leap onto a helicopter, and a new sense of self-worth. This is everything I thought I would find on my trip to Iceland the summer before my mission. The inspiration for the trip came from my favorite movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In the film, Walter leaves his…

As the oldest, obviously I’m obligated to be the hero in my family, saving everyone else from whatever monster I may encounter. The monster, of course, was my three-year-old sister, whose sole purpose (at least to me) was to fill whatever role I needed in my variety of imaginary games. She played the part perfectly…

It sat on the corner. Out of the bag poked a slender, broken, metallic arm reaching for freedom. I had seen it a couple of weeks before, hardly a stone’s throw from the church building. I watched, waiting for it to be claimed.   A short two years before, I had started the adolescent ritual of…

Dear reader, I want to first acknowledge that there are different situations and conditions that can prevent us from being happy all the time. All of us have felt it. With that said, I firmly believe that in most situations, we have the choice to be happy—and this is a story about choosing happiness and…

Once, there was a little pond, and on that little pond was a small flotilla of tiny leaf boats. This was my doing, of course. Eight-year-old me had quite the imagination. Frog catching and worm inspection were also prime time entertainment. During the summer, my dad and I would spend hours in the garden catching…