Dad, in his white undershirt and gym shorts, asked to speak with me one night. I didn’t think much of this; he often wished me goodnight with an “I love you” and a “sweet dreams” sprinkled in for good measure. But when he entered the bedroom and closed the door behind him, my heart dropped—he never closed the door. I knew what this was about.

Say it was a night, any night in the early ‘60s, and I was falling asleep in our brick rambler on Layton Drive in the sleepy DC suburbs. Corner lot, the two-trunked tree. A basement that, like every basement here, flooded after a hard rain. The collective moan meant everyone on Layton Drive was in the same boat, headed downstairs with our pails. Still, we, the Parks, were different from our neighbors; the only family that ate kimchi, for one thing. Kimchi with tuna boats, kimchi with spaghetti ‘n’ meatballs. I even liked it old and soggy but soon enough my mom would be fitting herself with those yellow Playtex gloves over an impressive mound of chopped cabbage and sliced red radishes topped with cayenne pepper. Translation: new kimchi! Fresh and crunchy, just the way I loved it.

Richard died New Year’s Eve 1997 at age 63. From this widow’s point of view, one confounding thing about death is its persistence through time. Day in, day out, year after year, the dead remain dead, even if they return momentarily in dreams or conversation or correspondence. You’re still dead? I find myself asking Richard, even though I’ve been happily remarried for 15 of the 22 years since he died. (Once, I dreamt that Richard returned. I am happy to see you, I said. But I am married. To someone else. That’s all right, he said, slipping into bed next to me and my husband).

Editor’s Note: “Chimera,” by Kathleen McNamara, was chosen by Ada Calhoun as the nonfiction winner of Columbia Journal‘s 2019 Winter Contest. It was published in Columbia Journal #58 and appears here with permission from the author.

I was laying on my couch, fishing pot stickers out of a Chinese to-go box, and watching a movie on my ex’s Disney+ account when my phone started chirping to life, and the record should note that I was done with the day.

The moment you hit send you know you’re fucked. Still, there’s a chance that if you move fast enough you can rip the cable from the back of your computer and prevent the email from blasting out to the group distribution list. Processing that thought takes less than one second and is accompanied by what feels like a full quart of adrenaline hitting your bloodstream with the force of a speedball. And so down you go, oblivious to the perilous state of your heart, which is already jackhammering an exit from your chest, into a briar patch of dust bunnies and dog-eared copies of The Economist and paper bag sarcophagi of rancid half-eaten lunches. Another second. You find the wire and yank so hard that your elbow smacks the underside of your desk and launches a Starbucks cup filled with two days of tobacco spit onto the carpet next to Alvarez’s foot. He recoils and fires off automatic rounds of trilled and profane vernacular but you barely hear it because you’re back on your feet in a modified three-point stance, your chair capsized next to you, your hand on the desk for support, your face six inches from the screen, searching for the parenthetical that will save your life: Outbox (1).

The other day, I texted my stepbrother for the first time in months—our relationship was one of the many that has been irreparably altered by the current political climate.

Joe had a sturdy mustache and a firm handshake. He didn’t say much to us at the airport, just loaded us into the back of his flatbed truck and gunned it. As he picked up speed, the wind cooled and whipped my hippy hair against my face. Fifteen minutes later, we were parked at the docks.

There was a corner of blue in Bastian’s otherwise brown eyes, a touch from his father, he told me. He was handsome, a young carpenter from Paris spending a summer in Seattle. With dark curls and a broad forehead, he had an eternal five o’clock shadow that felt like sandpaper against my palm, or according to the French, like a piece of toast – rasé avec une biscotte. Toast or sandpaper, I loved watching the creases of his face break into a boyish smile.

I want my mom. I do. I may be thirty-five years old—too old for wanting mothers—but I’m also thirty-five weeks pregnant. And I’m scared, I guess.

We are grateful to the contributions of over 500 writers and artists producing around the word of our choosing: Uprising.

I wake up with a Pangea of hives across my torso, stomach more red than white, blanching splotches tendrilling down my legs and up the inside of my arms. They went away over the weekend but are back now, pinpricked Monday night leeching into swollen Tuesday morning. I roll over, announce to my girlfriend Emily that I “definitely have leprosy,” and unpeel the covers to show her. She looks away in horror and I re-sheet myself. I don’t blame her. I’m disgusted too.

My husband and I currently have a running joke about our son Ethan’s death. Despite Ethan’s best efforts to put distance between him, a teenager who obviously knows everything, and us, his parents who are old fogies, to the point of choosing a college halfway across the country, he’s now stuck with us. Forever. My husband’s plan is for all of us to share the same urn so that Ethan will literally be stuck with us. My plan is to take his urn with us on our travels so we can take family photos at all the tourist traps. I’m currently researching how to travel internationally with an urn. You would think that there’s not a lot of articles on that, but a quick Google search came up with almost 25 million results. I can just picture it—the three of us at the Tower of London, or maybe at Kings Cross Station at platform 9-3/4. We could even use one of the photos as our Christmas card.

The night before I moved from Maryland to California by myself, I went to the ice cream shop with the color changing plastic spoons. I was fourteen. I had always been surrounded by family, having lived in a house with my grandmother, mother, grandfather, brother, and sister.

Tom had picked me up after his soccer game. He was fresh from the shower, his shaggy hair still slightly damp at the edges. He looked so beautiful. It was a Monday evening, three days after we had met. It was the first time we went on a date.

I am in a mid-sized village in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, studying abroad to learn Spanish. In the middle of my three-week stay, I want to make dinner for my host family. My host mother Doña Margo gives me two options for transforming the gallina into pollo —a sharp twist or a swift and deep slice through the neck. She looks at my hands, reads their inexperience, and tells me to use a knife. The bird is tied by its feet to a branch of the lemon tree, dazed by the rush of blood to its head. The dog knows, waits, eyes fixed on the packed earth beneath the bird.

Chen Maoping, known by her pen name Sanmao, was born in 1943 in Chongqing, China. A prolific writer and an ardent traveler, Sanmao lived in Taiwan, the Canary Islands, Central American, and Western Africa. Her life in countries abroad gave birth to over fourteen books, the most well-known of which, Stories of the Sahara, a hybrid of memoir and travelogue, catapulted her into the role of one of the most captivating and enigmatic writers at the time in the Chinese-speaking world.

In the Sonoma dusk, bats swoop above the winding road to our gate and around the garden pond below our bedroom window. I cannot see their faces; only the outline of wings and ears. The bats mostly stay away from me, in their hunt for nighttime insects that cluster in the shadows of the house.

I’m visiting my son who lives on a boat in a marina in the San Francisco Bay. The movement of the boat is almost imperceptible until I stand outside and it seems like the boat is still and it’s the dock that’s moving. I am so sleepy and although it’s 10 AM I crawl back into bed and pull the fake Sherpa cover over my head. I sob for a moment into the nubby polyester and consider sucking my thumb. I try it but get no satisfaction.

My neighbor, Willow, lights up when she sees me. Her face explodes into a wide grin, her eyes squinch up, and she ducks her chin into her roly-poly neck. She waddles over, twines her fat fingers into the wire fence, sticks her bare foot through one of the gaps, and wiggles it to say hello since her hands are otherwise occupied. She looks back to her mother, disengages one of her hands to point to a latch, and squeals gay! gay! Gate! Gate! She wants the barrier between us to dissolve.