Traveling with you is being hungry, always. We prowl the sites like jackals, waiting for our chance to jump. Hot, sugary churros chased down by beer after beer at the ancient bar behind the new colonialist temple, and the ruins of the older Aztec one where we ducked in to escape the rain and warm our July-cooled bones, and stayed until we were as dry and comfortable as the dogs we are, our conversation the only fire, and the music, and the only other people in the place another couple, she with heavy, tightly constrained hips and red, plum-red, hair.

“We’re excited to announce the results of The 2024 Page Prize in Creative Nonfiction, judged by Justin St. Germain!”

“I get to forty eight and stop counting. Laying each coat on the bed, shoulder to shoulder, they make a heaping, unruly camel’s back that could topple over at any moment. Again and again I return to the closet, lift out a different coat, search all the pockets, drop the hanger in the bag and spread it on the pile.”

“I thought they were rocks, but they’re turtles, moving slowly over one another to sun. Stretching out their gray necks. There’s a man behind me saying, ‘did you get one of these?’ to passersby and holding out a pamphlet titled Are You a Good Person?”

“My uncle drinks, my mother worries. They put me in the middle, use me as a topicof conversation when things get dull. They send me letters and out-of-print copies of their favorite books with thoughtful inscriptions.”

“Form 4: Self-Care Checklist

Instructions: as a new mom it is very important for you to take self-care seriously. Please mark each form of self-care you participate in. Please see footnotes for extra detail:”

“They avoid the family-friendly path, brush past the hikers beware sign and into the tallgrass Fire Loop where anything can happen from the waist down.”

“May 6, 1942, Richard wrote Toto, ‘I can’t tell you anything about our movements or what we are doing, but I can tell you that it looks like we are going to be in the thick of things before long.’”

“I never learned the value of letting decay and active rest refine me. Instead, I gathered perfection around me like a shield. It protected me, and trapped me in.”

“You pull into the last parking spot. You notice you parked a little crooked and want to reverse to straighten up, but there’s a white car with tinted windows behind you.”

“ I was uncomfortable with that thought. How often should you take stock of your life and evaluate the direction in which you’re headed? “

“I realized that was the first time in a long time that he was riding as a passenger and traveling much further beyond his regular five-mile radius.”

“These are her thoughts as she tries not to touch the summer’s welts and lumps and itches that insects have bestowed on her, as she notices waterbugs accumulating on the glue traps placed on the kitchen floor each month by the exterminator, as she tries and tries to swat the fruit flies multiplying around the rim of the covered compost bin, as she learns that certain beetles are chewing up the most ancient trees on Earth, as she reads Oliver Milman on the tricks and tribulations of insects.”

“Even when I was awake, fear dogged me. As my mom carried Finnegan down the street, I imagined her tripping and slamming into the concrete sidewalk. I pictured myself stepping over my injured mother to tend to my son, the necessary horror of casting her aside.”

“For the next several years, Mom was parasite-free. But then we heard rumors that an aunt had set her up with someone she encountered through her occasional hobby of drunk driving. My aunt had met this man at one of their court-ordered AA meetings. He owned a house, supposedly. He owned his own business, supposedly.“

“Her daughter - my daughter - delights in those peach-colored orbs floating in a sea of sugary coral, but her daughter - my daughter - didn’t come home last night from the hospital. The woman, unlike her daughter, returned home to find the cupboards bare, waiting.”

“It’s hard to explain a life built around avoidance. Any town too small for public transit was too small for my taste in men, women, cocktails, and shouting at starless skies.”

“ and Dad who has many words for any occasion didn’t know what he could say to Ethan besides that he loves him, and that yes, he would be honored to speak, but he tells us he doesn’t know what he will say because so far all he has been able to tell Ethan is that he loves him”

“Push past the charm of street trams and boxy Trabants, through the smog and cigarette old city air to where she’s passed up pastry and coffee to stroll in peace.”

“Sitting propped against pillows, cradling his dark heavy head, I begin, in a sort of sing-song voice, to list off everyone I can think of in our lives, everyone who loves him.”

“Closer, I see she holds a pitchfork buried in the body of an enormous rattlesnake writhing incomprehensibly down four wooden steps as its tail draws fast and meaningless symbols in the dirt.”

“I should tell you a few truths— we had been drinking, we had synthesized what other black inks we’d etch onto our skins, we were saying, “​protect your magic,” ​ or other things about healing and bodies. We were scantily-clad, bikini tops for shirts, and reeking of a freedom fruit that spoils only in black girl pH.” 

“Back when she and I shared a body, I thought too much about all the things that could go wrong: an infection, a genetic mutation, a single cell dividing abnormally. I exercised, meditated, gave up coffee and took my vitamins, knowing that whatever was happening inside of me, inside of her, was largely beyond our control. At every doctor’s appointment, I braced for bad news. Thankfully, luckily, none came. “

“An enactment of the truth, proof that our skin will always revolt in such a way? Black girls, black women, are there, in those six seconds, silent, waiting, invisibly unleashed, always present and living, fighting to be alive.“

“The Robitussin takes a really long time to kick in so I am sober for an entire sermon. I keep waiting for some sort of interesting visual or sensory hallucination but there is just this guy with an acoustic guitar praising Jesus, and my girlfriend who is waiting until marriage to have sex. “

“I wade in. I’ve always had compulsion to submerse myself, even when the ocean does nothing to welcome me. The water is the color and temperature of microwaved chicken broth. I lay back, the softness of my body holding me on the surface of the water. The waves are slowly building, stirred up by the first gusts of the looming storm. I’ve never seen it so windy here before.”

“That time working as a production assistant on the overnight film shoot in Connecticut and the old, cheap white tennis shoes I was wearing got wet and stunk so badly that everyone could smell something awful, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell the stranger I was sharing a room with that it was my shoes that were causing the stink we could not identify. I poured hand soap on them in the bathroom. Nothing worked.”

The structure’s design will be twofold, primarily taking the form of a large stone “tree,” akin to a mobile over a crib, with frying pans, baking sheets, mixing bowls, spatulas, serving forks, kitchen knives hanging from wires of various lengths strung from the branches.

“Was there more to the exchange? Did we talk more? Did we flirt? I don’t remember. I know I watched Emily and her red curls clamber happily into the back of a car and I told myself, as I told others when retelling the story, that to die with my friends would be preferable to walking back to the hostel and being abducted alone. The Young-Girl will never stop flattering herself for having "Common Sense.””

“ *Weeks later, Claus disclosed to the Altaposten—a newspaper located in his hometown of Alta—that the incident was not an incident at all but had all the elements to become one. During his interview, Claus explained that he “sat there and discovered all of a sudden that [the] use of the [Marius] stool could have unfortunate consequences for a man”. Cut the comedy out of the tall tale, and what remains is an eight-holed seat, posing a threat to lives and/or genitals. The safety of any naked soul who might contemplate the use of a Marius stool must take precedent. “