Ren Cedar Fuller
Naming My Father
Under the Sun
2022 Under the Sun Summer Writing Contest Winner
Selected by Sue William Silverman
My father could look at a loose metal bolt and say if it was a three-eighths or a five-sixteenths, but he could not name his four daughters unless we were lined up by height. He taught my sisters and me to eat corn on the cob left to right, two even rows at a time, like little typewriters. He walked as though his head were tied to an overhead cable. When my mother asked my father if he remembered her friend, Marjorie, he asked, "The one with symmetrical moles?"
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Checklist For a
Sign-Making Party
Hippocampus Magazine
“Can I have people over to make signs on Saturday?” Indigo called from the staircase. Saturday was the Seattle Women’s March of 2017.
“Of course,” I said, putting down my laptop and rising from the daybed. “Does that mean you’re going without me and Dad?”
“You can come,” they said. Indigo is nonbinary. That day, their head was shaved on one side with long wavy hair on the other, colored its natural brown.
My high schooler turned away, willing to march but not chitchat with me.
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