Issue 574 | The Sun Magazine

October 2023

Readers Write

Television

Sneaking cartoons, escaping into a sitcom, watching the election results

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

The Love Of My Life

We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done.

By Cheryl Strayed
Quotations

Sunbeams

It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I’m still to be born.

Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

The Sun Interview

Local Haunts

Colin Dickey On Place And Meaning In Ghost Stories

I think every place is haunted to one degree or another. And there will always be people who have a feeling when they visit a place, or believers who will say that they’ve seen something.

By David Mahaffey
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Lawn Skeletons

As far as I know, the first house in the neighborhood to adopt a year-round skeleton display was a small Cape Cod a couple of blocks from me. The skeletons sat side by side, day after day, in their Adirondack chairs, holding hands as if starring in a Cialis commercial.

By Tom McAllister
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Ice Age

I could see others finding happiness, but whenever I approached it, an invisible sheet of ice stopped me from getting any closer. I could never cross over to the other side; I could only pound on the ice that never cracked.

By Dan Leach
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Off Camera

When I was a senior in high school, I became obsessed with the home movies Dad kept in his armoire, behind bottles of cologne. Every day I’d reach through a cloud of Brut and vanilla musk, remove a tape from the stack, and watch the footage alone in our basement, captivated by images of the kid I used to be.

By John Paul Scotto
Fiction

Scale

She had read of various roughened skin patches that the internet described as “scales,” but these were not those. These were not, in fact, human.

By Jen Silverman
Photography

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Photograph By Ethan Hubbard
Poetry

The Tunnel

It started with the mouse in the grass by the sidewalk, ants / crawling on its face. Aidan wanted to touch it. I drew him back / and held him. We talked about the gray fur and the tiny ants. He asked / if the mouse was going to go home to his mama and daddy. / No, I told him, the mouse won’t get to go home again.

By Donovan McAbee
Poetry

I Eat My Words

Yes, it’s cruel. An unseemly gluttony. / Trapping the ortolan buntings, forcing / them to gorge in the dark, mouthfeel of seeds / their only comfort in that closed, blank space.

By Leona Sevick