Hothouse
Literary Journal
Category: Nonfiction
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Mimi Bhalla When I misbehaved as a child, my mother would suggest that I might be a Changeling. Her words were set with grim sincerity, as if seriously preoccupied that her baby girl might be gone, stolen in the night, replaced with an obscene imitation. At my indignation, she would double down until I was…
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Sarah Rizvi Modeled after “The Father From China” in China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston. I have watched you beg, Mother. You would say please after every request you had for my father, “Can you wash the dishes today, please?”, “Will you bring me some water, please?”, “Can’t you be nicer today, please?”, and each…
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Zane Duzant See, all that I ask for is a glass of water with ice. Now that I am moving nearby, I’d like to stop in. Ideally, on a daily basis. I hope to not be a bother. I’m positive sometimes I’ll be bothersome; afterall, you and I are only human. That is, I have…
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Stephanie Ro ‘I am growing up,’ she thought, taking her taper. ‘I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones,’ and she paced down the long gallery to her bedroom. — Virginia Woolf Looking back, it was a peculiar aloneness that I felt during those months in Korea—donning the superpower of invisibility. The first…
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Olivia Savage The female has always been a source of curiosity — a subject to study, speculate about and dismiss as an emotional liability. She is sensitive and vulnerable — deeply moved by the profundities of the world, or she is passionate and defensive — deeply inspired to challenge the injustices of the world, especially…
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By Eduardo Rincon On its surface, J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is, in essence, a story about nothing in particular. A phone conversation, a swim in the ocean, an altercation in an elevator—there’s not much plot here, and hardly a memorable action until the story’s sudden climactic finale. But it’s precisely in these…
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By Mia Johnson The quote, “My passions may govern me, but they cannot blind me” (149), from Madame de Lafayette’s The Princesse de Clèves, captures the essence of love and confession found in the novel. While the idea of committing a murder and beginning a relationship amidst coping with that reality would be thought to…
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By Maya Landers THE TOWN It isn’t pretty. The clouds hang low and we pass people my mom would call grit-mouths, from her West Virginia childhood, who scratch sores and spit chaw on the sidewalk. There is one Wal-Mart, one coffee shop, one good pizza place in the next town over. You can see Lake…
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By Lucia Llano stage i. sleepwalk I spent that summer sleepwalking, with my hands fluttering in slumber, with imprints of bedsheets on my hot skin. I had fresh eyes. With every July dawn, I woke up with the fullness of my life in my hands. My palms were stained green with it. I lived slowly…
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By Wynn Wilkinson Between 1337 and 1339, the early Italian Renaissance painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a series of six frescoes in the Republic of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, or town hall, that have earned the artist a surprising spot on the list of most relevant Western commentators on the origin of the state, right beside big…
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By Wynn Wilkinson This is a gay bar, Jesus. It looks like any other bar on the outside, only it isn’t. Men stand three and four deep at this bar– some just feeling a sense of belonging here, others making contacts for new partners. This isn’t very much like a church, Christ, but many members…
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By Lucia Llano I grew up in the kind of town that made you think of your past lives often. It was a little orange city, melting, pouring over the Mexican border. It never knew of anything but itself. A West Texas town breathing within an egocentric vacuum. A living city amongst the walking dead.…
Hothouse 