While we cherish all the stories and articles we are profoundly grateful to publish each year at Across The Margin, we are thrilled to present a look at some of our favorites of the year, and an excerpt from each to wet your whistle…
Nonfiction
“Reframed : The Art of Recovery” by Evelyn Byrne
“I wonder if the song of the ink beneath our paint can still be heard.” A life struggle and journey framed against an ambitious restoration of a Wassily Kandinsky print…
“When my parents separated, the first non-practical thing bought for our new home was a print of the 1936 Wassily Kandinsky work Dominant Curve. Painted towards the end of Kandinsky’s life, it is a vivid landscape of abstract shapes that expand across the canvas. The piece has a sense of distance using a wide sweeping curve to split it into parts with the sharp lines of the foreground contrasting distant, more organic, forms. Initially bought to cover up a patch of unpainted wall left by the previous owner, it was still covering the same spot when I came home from university early with a diagnosis of anorexia.”
“Maple for Chaparral” by Deborah Vinall, PsyD
A youth unmasked. A journey towards adulthood that crosses borders, faces hard truths, and leaves one feeling like a stranger within familiar haunts…
“The first time I am kicked out of my family’s home I am nine. Hot, angry tears stream down my cheeks as I set out in search of shelter, wandering the winding roads of the orchard valley that is my home. I roam between trees laden with apples and along the trickling creek where bullrushes emerge and mallards nestle between reeds. I pass the old yellow school bus that I know is open and know all too well has a bed in back, but where ghosts haunt my guilty memory of the teenager last summer. I rattle locks on rusty cars and sheds. I am trying the door to a neighbor’s llama barn when headlights find me. Dad steps one leg out of the station wagon, calls my name. I turn, hesitate, then go to him. I crawl into the warmth of the vehicle’s brown interior and pull the belt over me, a piece of safety. He turns the car around and we return silently home.”
“The Sopranos Answer (On Writing)” by Thomas Belton
“It’s the rush of invention when you can’t control it, that’s why we write.” A voyeur, by nature and by trade, expounds upon the various powers to the imagination for a writer…
“Is that all we can really do, I thought, to preserve ourselves in time? Take the visceral impressions that rise above the mundane moments at work or play, the neuronal images of something more, a subjective moment of joy turned into a bit or narrative, images left in fleeting passages between idle moments at work, or at home, or play then reiterate them as fictional fantasies? Because if it is, I’m glad! Because I still have them and when I read these lines, I’m alive again in that moment, thirty years ago, living that emotion as I wrote down my impression, as young and as fresh as I was back then, no regrets at the lost seconds of living in the moment, loving the fantasy that filled the detracted day dream that became my written word. Here is one of those experiences and impressions.”
“Anti-Essence” by Titoxz
“Unlike Sisyphus, we are not bound by chains or curses. We push the rock not because we must but because we lack the courage to let it crush us.” A deep dive into the fragility of identity, the illusions we create about ourselves, and the existential void beneath our personal narratives…
“Consider a lunatic king or a president plagued by delusions of grandeur. A leader who whispers to ghosts or communes with invisible gods is not labeled insane if their delusions serve power. Their madness becomes charisma, their paranoia policy. What is foresight but deranged vision, cast in a glow of authority? And what are we, the masses, if not believers in the shared illusion? Sanity itself is a currency minted by the powerful, and those who control its flow dictate who wears the crown of genius and who the yoke of madness.”
“A Closed Door is Not a Wall” by Charlotte Gullick
“What would have been possible if I didn’t have to flounder and fight?” A lesson in perseverance that challenges the myth that artists, and specifically writers, must suffer in isolation…
“I sat across from her in the office, nervous because she was new to campus but also excited because I’d worked hard on the section of my book she now held in her hands. She had strikingly brown, almost black, hair that contrasted powerfully with her blue eyes. This was my thesis advisor. I was one of the few students she was assigned during her initial semester. I’d struggled during my first year of studying creative writing as a graduate student, barely completing assignments, not giving my all because I was uncertain if my kind of stories were welcome in this environment. Before she came, I’d made little headway with the novel I’d begun as an undergraduate. This was our first meeting about my writing, and I studied the books on the shelves behind her — all those stories deemed worthy to be printed — lined up together in both judgment and inspiration.”
“Impermanence” by Saroj Kunnakkat
“Where did this fear start, this indelible urge to hold on with such force our fingernails threatened to fall off?” A reflection on motherhood that holds within it the hard truth that nothing last forever…
“I remember when my daughter was just over a year old. Her hair was in long pigtails, their ends jagged, seeming to erupt from her temples like inky fountains. In her small hands — stubbornly enrobed in baby fat — she held magnet tiles which she attempted to assemble. I sat alongside her on the playmat in the middle of our living room in our old Cleveland home. As I watched her tinker around, I built a house out of the remaining magnet tiles, partly to foster parallel play in her, and partly because it was an excuse for me to tap into the world of play I hadn’t known in years if not decades. The house I built was decidedly commonplace with its symmetric windows and sloping roof, like a child’s drawing of a house. With a fluidity that belied her one year, my daughter suddenly stood up and smashed my house to its foundation. It was a lesson in impermanence I had been taught repeatedly since her birth.
Nothing lasts forever.”
“The Gospel of Maggie Rose” by Lily Herman
“It meant I hadn’t died with my husband, it meant I was back among the living, and that raised the stakes.” A tribute to the music of Maggie Rogers that speaks to the healing power of music…
“Rituals can enter our lives in one of a few ways. The first — and perhaps most prevalent in our culture — is through a Protestant-inspired perseverance. We want to learn a second language, so we rely on a little cartoon to offer rewards in the form of daily gold stars. We want to start running, so we join a group whose members will remind us of our goals, and lightly shame us when we skirt them. We beat ourselves up when we don’t accomplish all that we set out to do, or puff up with an excess of pride when we do. In the earliest days following my husband Daniel’s death, I tried to use these will-powered techniques to embrace a new path. Our life together had been so tumultuous, and his death had consumed me so completely, that I reached for identity like a life raft. I needed to be nameable, tangible, something that couldn’t be washed entirely away. A religious commitment seemed like just the thing.”
“Old Fashioned Truth” by Katlin Singh
A work of creative nonfiction that ponders the notion of where one can confidently call home…
“I am compelled to tell the bartender, really anyone who will listen, about real Old Fashioneds, because the differences between the two drinks are important to me. A New York Old Fashioned is direct, there is no hiding the alcohol. It is also pretentious, made of expensive whiskey and small-batch bitters and giant, fancy ice cubes. A Wisconsin Old Fashioned is strong, too, but much sweeter, the alcohol hidden, perhaps a bit passive-aggressively, behind sugar and cherries and 7UP. It’s humble, not showy at all, with its base of cheap brandy and freezer-tray ice cubes. And this is important because I, too, am much sweeter than the average New Yorker, and certainly less pretentious. At least that’s what the alcohol pulsing through me says.”
Fiction
“The Boy Who Spoke in Rivers” by Fendy Satria Tulodo
A short story that explores the connection between place, identity, and the stories carried by the natural world…
“The first time I realized that silence could be loud was when I was eight years old, standing knee-deep in the Brantas River. My grandfather, a man who wore stories like an old shirt, had told me that rivers speak if you listen hard enough. The water curled around my legs, tugging at me with invisible hands, and in that moment, I understood something I couldn’t yet put into words: that some things flow away, no matter how tightly you try to hold them.”
“The Dissent” by Robert Trueblood
A work of speculative jurisprudence, set twenty-five years in the future, that hauntinly prophesies the court cases that await in the wake of 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC decision…
“The first begins at Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010). Citizens United was nominally about a partisan film studio bucking against restrictions on releasing political content just before an election. The court elected to take up a larger question. Their judgment regarded spending by corporations during and around elections. Under the understanding that corporations are associations of citizens, and as citizens have the right to free speech, they ruled that corporations must be granted the same rights. They held that restricting election spending from corporations infringed upon their free speech rights, since money is used by parties to facilitate speech. In their opinion, limits on corporate expenditures are therefore unconstitutional. This opened the door for vast amounts of money to flood into the political process, and (despite the court’s protestations at the time) it is possible to draw a direct line between those parties who contributed heavily through Political Action Committees and those who the government has treated favorably.”
“Breaking and Entering” by Jacqueline Cope
A short story where the passing of a parent brings forth the unpacking of not just a home, but of a mother-daughter relationship…
“There’d been no need for a funeral. Patricia’s mother was divorced and had no close family other than Patricia. So, it was up to Patricia to travel from San Francisco to New Jersey to pack up her mother’s house and get it ready for sale. At first Patricia’s husband insisted on traveling with her — “I don’t want you to be alone while you’re grieving,” — but Patricia reassured him with a shrug. “It’s not like that. I don’t have any grief.” And that was the truth, but even more than that, the thought of her husband watching her sort through the contents of the house mortified her. She couldn’t imagine anything in her mother’s home that would be worth salvaging. Patricia didn’t want a stack of back issues of Reader’s Digest or a collection of porcelain Beswick cats. She’d considered hiring someone to empty the house for her, but then she sensed her mother ordering her from the grave — no, ordering her from inside Patricia herself — to do the right thing and take care of business. There is so little I have ever asked of you, her mother’s voice said. Patricia was defenseless.”
“The House of Denied Mercies” by Raymond Brunell
A gothic horror story which reimagines the parole system through a supernatural lens — a house that literally manifests bureaucratic denials as locked doors, each containing the dying hope of a rejected second chance…
“Cassius paused before it, the coffee mug trembling in his hand. He reached for the handle once, twice, then hurried away. I felt his pulse through the floorboards — rapid, guilty, alive.
The scratching began that night. Not desperate clawing, but something far worse: the methodical, patient sound of fingernails dragging across wood in slow, measured strokes. The rhythm was hypnotic, maddening, like a metronome counting down to some inevitable conclusion. Behind the Valdez door, hope was performing its death dance.”
“Hierarchy of Needs” by Arvilla Fee
A work of fiction, informed by an educator’s 12 years spent as a high school teacher, which highlights the beauty born of ensuring no child is left behind…
“I’m listening to Matt read from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act III Scene 2. He’s giving a rich, booming rendition of Mark Antony’s impassioned speech to the fickle crowd. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.” As drawn as I am to Matt’s voice, I still can’t help but notice Alejandro’s head on his desk, one arm flung out in front of him, one arm hanging by his side. Another couple of minutes, and he’ll most likely be snoring. I’ve tried to engage him, and he did grudgingly read a couple of Brutus’s lines yesterday, but for the most part, all he wants to do is sleep. Before the bell rings, I make up my mind to ask Alejandro to stay behind.”
“The Voice of Command” by Phoebe Danaher
A short story in which a game-changing technique has the ability to harness a power so potent it can bring seemingly impossible dreams to life…
“The ladies explained the method. Lisa figured out which part of the brain to stimulate. Janet learned the specific voice register that touched it. Sophia developed a vocabulary to reinforce the command. They could have won the Nobel for it, they told me, if they could have trusted the world with that information.”
“Blurred” by Ben Macnair
A work of psychological horror featuring a transformative relic from the past illuminating a cluster of disconcerting figures….
“It surfaced during a rare fit of domesticity, a weekend spent sifting through an old box of my parents’ forgotten trinkets. They’d passed years ago, leaving me with a mountain of sentimental junk I’d never quite found the energy to go through. This box was full of faded holiday snaps, school reports, and various bits of childhood ephemera. Tucked at the very bottom, beneath a pressed flower and a lock of my baby hair, was a single, peculiar photograph.
It was an old print, slightly curled at the edges, the colors muted by time. It showed me, perhaps five or six years old, standing awkwardly in a sun-drenched park. I was wearing a ridiculous striped t-shirt and clutching a deflated balloon, a faint, almost shy smile on my face. A normal, mundane childhood snap. Except for the background.”
