When Jade was only twelve-years-old, her father came home one afternoon with his arms and legs covered in claw marks. Jade felt confused and excited about his appearance. While she didn’t like seeing her dad hurt, she wondered if he finally bought her the cat or dog she wanted. He wasn’t good with animals and she figured it must have attacked him on the car ride home. To Jade’s dismay, he didn’t bear hug her or call her his “little troll,” a nickname he gave her for the vibrantly colored hair extensions she always wore. He hurried into the bathroom and shut the door. “Second time. This isn’t good at all,” she heard him say through the door. “I have…

“I still have nightmares about my mother,” I told my friend Zack on a frigid October night in downtown Mystic. “She’s running through the Darién jungle from a man dressed head to toe in camouflage. His face is shadowy and deformed. I can’t see my mother’s face, but I can hear her scream.” Zack’s face was as pale as mine, flushed with goosebumps. “I…don’t know what to say.” I kept the rest of the dream to myself because it was too terrifying to put into words. I never met my mother or even saw a picture of her. In my dreams, however, I saw her braided hair, mestizo skin, and unblinking brown eyes so vividly that I felt like I…

My best friends Darius and Jordan learned about my fear of swimming during an impromptu tubing trip on the Farmington River. The summer after I turned twenty-six, Darius and Jordan took me to Foxborough Park, a park that ran alongside the river. Foxborough Park had recently undergone improvements as a part of the town’s beautification project. My parents once described the park as being “overrun by druggies and dropouts.” After the project completed, the town’s lilly-white, upper-middle class community became a mainstay of the park. We preferred the park the old way, even with its reputation, because it was our high school hangout and our getaway during difficult times. “The wonders of gentrification,” Jordan said, gesturing to the Black Bear…

The first time Sasha got high, she stood face-to-face with a black bear in the backyard of her friend’s house. She was giggling while her two best friends Jade and Colt stood behind her absolutely terrified. She wasn’t sure why this was her reaction or what other drug those edible gummy bears were laced with, but the bear looked adorable standing on its hind legs and raising its snout into the air. “Don’t scream,” Sasha said, still giggling. “It will only provoke it. Where I grew up, we had bears in our woods all the time. If you don’t move, it will go away eventually.” “You’re out of your fucking mind,” Colt snapped in a harsh whisper. “Honey, I don’t…

When my grandfather passed away during an early winter, my family scrambled to rid the house of his belongings before the first major storm. The asphalt-shingle roof of his one-story home was collapsing inward after years of neglect and most of the windows were boarded up with cheap plywood. Instead of paying for the repairs, my parents decided to leave the fate of the quaint brick abode up to Mother Nature. It was the first time we had visited since they relocated my grandfather to a nursing home, but the place somehow looked the same as when he lived there. We found the house stocked with canned goods, furniture, machine parts and magazines that he had accumulated over the years…