by Seth Winger

I’ve driven up to the front gate several times in the last two and a half weeks, but the guard on duty isn’t one I recognize: a man—not much older than I am but a lot larger—who looks cramped in the small booth.

The cannon bewitches the body…the school compels the soul.”
-Ambiguous Adventure

Some ten years ago, while my mother and I lived in Dakar, Senegal in an overlarge white concrete building between the grandiose villa of a corrupt politician with three wives and a squatter settlement covered in weeds and rocks, I first came across a copy of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Aventure Ambigue. It stood slightly askew on our mahogany shelf among several dozen thicker, newer books purchased in airport boutiques in Paris or New York. Until that afternoon, I had somehow overlooked …

Watch, little child
She stands on a step-stool in a sunlit kitchen in Damascus, watching her grandmother’s pale hands fashion food for a family of ten. Although her grandmother tries to shoo her away, the bird-like six-year-old perches at the old woman’s side everyday, straining her small neck to catch every motion. She learns how to pluck the feathers from a chicken, how to blend chickpeas into hummus, how to burrow walnuts into fresh dates.
As the girl grows older, her grandmother sends her to do the shopping and she pumps …

By Meghan Daniels
Some possible hooks:
1. The pain. Ice pick jabbing into flesh. An electric shock. As though the wind has stripped your skin. The image of my grandmother’s face, skeletal and raw.
Download Scrapbook with full formatting as a pdf.

By Amy Kurzweil
These are the sounds of Sunday School: an off-key guitar spitting songs against the stained glass windows. The whispers of boys in vans and kippahs. This is what Sunday School tastes like: grape juice. Challah toasted with honey. This is what the synagogue smells like: a vacuumed rug. This is how I feel: like I don’t belong. Eleven am Sunday brings me here against my will. I am 12 years old and I have better things to do than shift awkwardly in a pew while pondering why the …