Lucinda Cummings

April 2026 | nonfiction

Pockets

When my firstborn son Benjamin attended morning preschool, his grandma picked him up afterwards, and they spent afternoons together while I worked. On my birthday, the year he was 3, Benjamin asked his “Gamma” for white fabric. He cut out four jagged cotton squares, enlisting her help to stitch each pair together on three sides. On the open sides, he clipped safety pins to the corners.

When I arrived to pick him up, he danced around the room, blue eyes alight, clutching a package wrapped in crumpled green paper with too much tape. “I made it for you, Mom, and it’s a surprise! Happy Birthday! Open it now!”

I tore open the wrapping paper and pulled out the squares, both decorated in marker with clumsily drawn flowers and designs, my full name inscribed on the front of each one by his grandma. A fabric birthday card covered in red hearts accompanied the gift – twenty hearts in all, outlined by Gamma, painstakingly colored in by Benjamin.

“They’re pockets, for you!” he exclaimed, grinning and bouncing in place. “See, you can pin them on your shirt and you’ll always have pockets to put stuff in! And they’re portable pockets, so you can move them when you change your clothes! See?”

I sat down to pin the pockets onto my dress, moved by the tenderness of his gift, admiring his ingenuity. When I stood to model the new pockets, I asked, “Whose idea was this?”

Delight shone on his face, and Gamma nodded, as he declared, “It was my idea! Gamma just helped!”

Benjamin died suddenly on New Year’s Day when he was 23.  Today I stroke the worn cotton pockets in my lap, tracing the marks made by his small hands, marveling at his loving creativity, longing. If only I could have tucked Benjamin inside these pockets like a baby kangaroo, protecting him from harm.

Lucinda Cummings

Lucinda Cummings is a writer and retired psychologist who lives in Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, The Baltimore Review, Woven Tale Press, Glassworks, and other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays 2023. She is working on a memoir about erasure.

Robin Carstensen

April 2026 | nonfiction

Log Book. Camp Mystic, Kerrville, Texas. Northern Hemisphere, Planet Earth

                                                Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster

                                                warning systems this year. . . Texas Tribune. July 6, 2025.

July 10^th, 2025—173 children still missing along the Guadalupe River, Texas Hill Country:

We bet on our chances down to the last community card we call the river, playing Texas Hold’ Em. We spoke in a hush how the nature of any river is to rise if there be a notion to rise, and we watched on TV how the Guadalupe rose up and ravaged everything—the clouds just pouring out a beast. No warning shot or godly thought for us, the parents hobbled, waiting and crouched by their phones for a word. Cabins and trees in flood alley washed away, hands grasping edges, branches, rocks, and then there was us the next morning, the next night still alive in our usual aliveness but clinging to our crosses and submerged in our minds with the children, clawing with them to breathe, rise from the cresting water, keep their heads above for god’s sake as long as they could, for god’s sake may the legion of angels have lifted their souls out of their blameless bodies before the hypoxia strangled, before those of us left behind warbling the cosmos wracked our senses to make it make sense, to find redemption for our gods and our savage governance—no emergency alerts, no disaster response; sirens drowned in the fellowship halls and house bills of mammon. Is it all on us, every loss for Christ’s sake, isn’t there a trail to the highlands of some verdant loveliness? For holy sake, bring us a map and compass, a chance to behold, all the missing children blossoming from the Guadalupe to Gaza to Iran to Sudan and the sons of Russia sent to slaughter. There’s got to be a path, a second chance, a field the children are playing on, their wizard hats and healing balm flashing under the moon, is this what they chose to do for the sake of us, for our unfolding consciousness, once upon a time before time and Camp Mystic, then to the river, then to the radiant fields of lantana where they must be, must, they must have.

Robin Carstensen

Robin Carstensen’s work is recently published in RiverSedge and many more. Club Plum Lit also recently published and nominated her flash for a Pushcart Prize, 2024. Her chapbook In the Temple of Shining Mercy won first-place and was published by Iron Horse Literary Press, 2017. She is the senior executive co-founding editor for The Windward Review, now in Volume 24.

Amy Agape

January 2026 | nonfiction

If You Were There

If you were there, you surely would have noticed the scarlet slash cleaving the soft brown fuzz. Her roly-poly-curved shrunken shape. White sheets, once crisp, now softened by sweat. Darkened room illuminated regularly for blood draws, IV exchanges.

You would have heard her on the phone. Do you have avocados? Maybe bring one of those. And toast? Black beans too, those might work. Oh, a wheat tortilla and some grilled chicken. I can make a little taco. Maybe a bite of that will stay down. Ice cream, too, please, sometimes that’s okay. Something cold to drink – maybe Pepsi? No, Sprite.

Then, turning to me, “Can you believe it? My mom and sisters took my daughter. They were supposed to pick up pizza, bring it back here to eat with me. That would have been nice, right? They just texted that they are coming later, after they’ve finished eating. Why couldn’t they just eat here with me? Now I’m starving, and it may be too late to be able to hold anything down. That’s not nice of them, is it?”

You would have witnessed a woman arriving with a stack of cards. “You’ve got lots to do, Sis. I planned for all the birthdays, the graduations, even their weddings.” Maybe you would have recognized appropriation disguised as altruism.

You likely would have noted the numbers scattered throughout her questions. Will I be here 2 months from now? Can you believe the nurses have to wear gowns and gloves to hand me this 1 little pill? What should I tell my 3 children? Do you think they realize I may only have 14 days to live?

You never would have noticed:

A scar, mollified by years, a kind of cleavage under my blouse

Me alone in the bed, my family out for burgers

Suppressed shame that I was unable to write letters to my kids like the dying mom on Oprah

The newspaper clipping shared by a friend – a grief camp for kids with dead parents

My own numbers: 2 weeks to live; 12 previous cases, all diagnosed by autopsy; 3 major surgeries and dozens of procedures; 25 bonus years

An infant son learning to walk in my hospital room

His younger sister, not even arrived by that hospital room but present for all the following ones with the new scars and new guilt and new hope and new joy

You may have noticed me grab her hand, look into her eyes, whisper, “I’m here.”

Amy Agape

Amy Agape, PhD, provides spiritual companionship to hospitalized individuals and their families. This work, rooted in her own experience with a rare illness, invites her to listen deeply to others’ stories and explore the ways they interweave with her own. Amy dreams of a world where all people experience the profound blessing of being companioned with loving presence. She intends to spend the remainder of her days helping to create that world.

Richard Holinger

January 2026 | nonfiction

Diapers

In rural northern Illinois northwest of Chicago, a raised, pressed, gray gravel path, long ago a railroad track, runs straight for miles, bordered by trees. On one side, farmers harvest their cornfields, green John Deere combines and tractors stirring up more dust than smoke from a forest fire. On the other side, houses on two-acre lots show off manicured, landscaped backyards with two and three-story mansions with castle-like turrets and floor-to-ceiling windows.

Walking through this shadowy tunnel one day, I meet Blackjack, a 14-year-old deaf, half-blind black lab. The man walking him, Mike, looks like Hemingway in his later, Ketchum years. He tells me he is a retired contractor.

I am strolling our family’s miniature poodle, a dog rescued when ten-years-old, now lying wrapped in blankets in a baby carriage because, at 18, partially deaf and mostly blind, she no longer walks.

Like aging men do, we start talking general aches—physical and familial—and how we handle them, then graduate to specific body parts. I brag two replaced hips, he a prostate.

“The friends of mine who had them taken out all wear diapers today,” Mike says, his voice low, gravelly. “Me, I got nuclear implants. They put in radioactive seeds that kill the cancer. They said I had eight years. That was back in 1998, more’n twenty years ago.”

Before surgery, Mike asked his doctor, “Will I still be able to get it up?”

“I’m not a miracle-worker,” his oncologist answered. “Can you get it up now?”

I tell him when eight or nine-years-old, I had to tap twice with the first two fingers of my left hand each light pole passed when walking to my elementary school on Dearborn Place or else something horrific beyond imagining would befall me.

I never missed touching one. Maybe I was afraid each would collapse if not tapped.

After one or two more serendipitous meetings, I no longer met Mike and Blackjack. Then Summer died. Occasionally I walked the Great Western Trail thinking I’d run into Mike, most likely alone. I looked forward to seeing him. After many strolls, no sign of him or his dog, I pretty much stopped walking there. Maybe he, like Blackjack, was no longer able to make it out, his prostate issues finally catching up to him.

The town we lived in bought a farm with a prairie growing an infinite number of wildflowers, a marsh where egrets and herons gathered, and multiple pairs of bluebird houses. I would have loved to walk it with Mike. Why hadn’t I asked for his contact information? Every time we met I left after saying goodbye thinking I’d see him next time when we would exchange phone numbers or emails, when more convenient, when we had more time.

Now I step onto the gravel trail, look up and down the shady path, see one bike rider in the distance, know it’s not Mike, know I won’t see him today, and know I won’t see him again, ever.

Richard Holinger

Richard Holinger’s work has recently appeared in Chautauqua, SIR, Cleaver, Whitefish Review, Cutleaf, and elsewhere. Nominations include the Pushcart Prize (5), Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction 2025, including the latter. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). His 2025 poetry chapbook, Down from the Sycamores, is available from www.finishinglinepress.com, and a short fiction collection, Unimaginable Things, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publications. He holds a doctorate in creative writing from UIC, taught high school and community college English for decades, and lives in rural northern Illinois.

Carlos Cunha

January 2026 | nonfiction

Monochrome Lane

The strip mall may well be on its last legs, but it still litters the landscape of many American towns and suburbs, especially here in Florida – an aggressively charmless, deservedly unloved suburban phenomenon that usually consists of nothing more than a basic parking lot with, at one end, a drably functional strip of windowed boxes that are usually rented out to low-end retail businesses, some local, some nation or regional chains, their motley commercial signage usually obeying no single design standard.

Running an errand on my bike one afternoon, I came to the example of this phenomenon nearest to where I live, a fairly large one, and, to avoid the unpredictable driving of cars using the busier sections of its expansive and otherwise mostly empty parking lot, I chose to cut through the service lane that runs between the back of the stores and some woods and wetlands where, as a bonus, I thought I might spot some interesting water fowl, although what ended up catching my eye instead was the back of the strip mall itself, and how extreme an aggravation you might say it was of the drabness in front. If the front looked drab, the back was drabness itself, because all of it was painted one color, a light, muddy yellow-brown. The effect was eerie, and ended up seeming even artful. It was as though a revealing statement were being made about the deceptive nature of the front, about how, behind commerce’s meretricious variety, lies a drably monochromatic, rather industrial sameness. And it was a statement that, sadly, could have extended to the lives of those suburban residents, including me, whom this strip mall was intended to serve. Not only were the backs of the different stores not distinguished by differing hues, the features on those buildings were not, so that I had to concentrate to notice, then to identify, the things camouflaged by that monochrome mudslide of yellow. The building backs were deprived not only of difference but, practically, of a third dimension, the clayey quality of the paint being such that it seemed to elude shadows, flattening doorknobs, locks, door jambs, vents, grills, lamp standards, lamp shades, awnings, AC plants, large industrial alarm bells, sundry wires, cables, pipes, casings. It called to mind the desert topography of long-dead worlds where all features are merely vestigial.

So it came almost as a shock when one of those vestigial doors swung open and someone — a living person, a woman, a worker — appeared, backing out uncertainly. It turned out that she was pulling a shopping cart after her, and her hesitancy had to do with the fact that the cart was piled high with precariously perched empty brown boxes, the sameness of their color echoing the sameness of the color of the back of the strip mall, as if delivering the same dismaying message.

Carlos Cunha

Carlos Cunha is a journalist. His literary writing was noted in the Best American Essays 2019 anthology edited by Rebecca Solnit, and he has been published in the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a Seattle Review edition edited by David Shields. Born in Portugal, he grew up in South Africa and lives in Gainesville, Florida.