Mystery House
A door opens onto a wall. A window is trapped behind another.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
On Thursday mornings in the village where I live surrounded by the Green Mountains of Vermont, I meet with a small group of artists to share the cost of a live model for three hours. The drawings shown here result from these sessions. I use 300lb. Arches Aquarelle paper 22X30 and handmade oil pigment bars blended with my fingers. I consider these recent works to be drawings, even as they are made with paint. The marks I make are derived from the human form and evolve intuitively. For more exa...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Nonfiction| brevitymag.com
Against a backdrop of spruce trees at the far end of a small beach, a large boulder squats at the edge of the bay. Its top half is dry and pale. The lower half is damp and dirty-bronze. It’s too big to be jostled by the tides. In the foreground of this photo, dozens of smaller stones lie half-buried in sand. Beyond the boulder, a dead spruce has been partially uprooted. Its bare branches look brittle against the other, still upright, lushly-needled trees. From the photo, it’s impossible t...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I’m on a miniature riverboat or a Chinese junk, or a wooden houseboat with a paddle wheel. I’m captain and crew. The inlet is crowded with vessels from earlier ages of sea-going vessels: hollowed out canoes, reed boats, a schooner, a pinnace. There’s an old dock and a pier and it’s crowded with vendors hawking their wares, but I can’t tell what they’re selling, and I don’t care. I have to take a piss, desperately. There’s nothing more important than that. As my boat floats clo...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Dad answered and put me on speakerphone, then placed a plastic plate divided into five colored sections in front of mom at their kitchen table and said, it’s Laura, time for your morning medicines; I said, Mom, pick up the biggest oval white pill in the center of the plate and she said, “which one?” and I said the biggest oval white pill in the center of the plate, and she said, “I didn’t know it was my job to take it,” and I heard her lift the glass of iced water, so I read aloud...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Buying baby socks and three onesies and one newborn outfit on the way to the appointment where the fetal doppler told us you were dead, the same newborn outfit I now see in the box on the closet floor every day when I drag out a sweater. My parents driving across five states to stay with our four-year-old who would have been your sibling, his hand waving out the car window when they drove him to preschool the morning we left for the hospital, as if waving you goodbye. Canceling the baby books...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
The Start of It A friend of D’s wife G says there’s been a bad accident. “That’s all I know,” she says, “except that it happened on Rte. 15 and Laurel Road.” She lowers her voice as if she doesn’t want to be overheard. “D is in surgery right now as I’m telling you this. G is at the hospital. Their kids are on their way.” A Bit of It Hours later, a posted photo of the accident site on Facebook shows one car destroyed, the front end crushed, the rest damaged by fire. D’s...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I’ve been hanging around a lot of elderly folks recently, very elderly, and I don’t know what to say to them. I am so much younger. The techs put me on a completely different treadmill way off in the corner (at one point I am actually running), and on totally different resistance settings on the cardio-bike. “I don’t feel like I belong here,” I told my wife after the first day, as she picked me up outside the medical center. (I am not allowed to drive for a month.) I sat in the pass...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
The memory comes fast and furious like an Alabama storm. How I used to drive you to the trailer park past Plantation Hills so you could fuck men for 35 dollars a pop, migrant workers that lived two too many to a bedroom. Were you even 18 then? You’d give me 10 dollars to drive you; 20 if I said no and really meant it. A couple quick shooters and you could have enough to last the weekend. The best rocks were dense. Ribbed like slickrock, the moon rocks you buy at the hippy store, the ones me...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
The picture takes up most of the wall opposite my boyfriend’s bed. A photograph of white camellias in a crystal vase. I sit with my arms around my knees, naked under the duvet, watching the image through the conservation glass. He is downstairs making breakfast. When it’s ready he will call me down and seat me in the sun in the small courtyard between his house and studio, where he’s set a table for one: crisp white cloth, spotless silver cutlery. He’ll serve me orange juice, granola ...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Sure, sex is great, but have you ever clocked out of a waitress shift on a night when everything went right instead of wrong and at the exact moment you’re pulling out of the parking spot you performed laborious geometry to fit into someone yells “I love your truck!” and you drive home with the windows down blasting Tori Amos and you find that you don’t care, not even a little, if you’re hitting the notes because it’s a warm, wet night in deep spring and every frog in the world si...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I am supporting the ghost of Jackie’s body and doing math. How many drinks has she had? Three? Four? We are curved together over the lip of the trash can as she empties her stomach. Her bile smells sweet and acrid, the desiccated remnants of a mango-pineapple mixer. A cup of ice water sits, sweating and futile, on the floor by her feet. Her skin is shiny and leached of color, amplified by the artificial lights in the windowless bar bathroom. Earlier there was a man, tall and insistent. Men ...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Brevity’s Spring 2025 issue features brilliant new essays from Barbara Hurd, Gary Fincke, Daniel Wallace, Clare Needham, Lindsey Pharr, Anne Valente, Rachel Nevada Wood, Laura Johnsrude, C.R. Calabria, and Sean Lovelace.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
It’s 6pm on a Sunday when Brittany calls to tell me about the mealworms. The mealworms, she tells me, are laudatory—an honor, a reward for good behavior in this, her fifth year in what will almost certainly prove a lifetime sentence at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. I stand in the parking lot of the local nature preserve, hoist the last remaining stretch of bright blue kayak onto the roof-rack of my SUV and strap it in. On the phone, Brittany is ecstatic, explaining that this role as mea...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Práta means potato, child. Prátaí póir are seed-potatoes best planted on Good Friday. Iomaire is a potato bed and taobhfhód its own particular sod. Bachlóga are potato sprouts; millíní are the buds. Báinseog phrátaí is a patch of potatoes in bloom, lovelier than you might think. Caldar is a big potato. Práta préacháin is a potato pecked by a crow. Paidríní are tiny as rosary beads. Sliomach is soggy, prátai breaca have gone off, prátai dubha are nothing but rot. Smoladh i...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” —Philip Larkin We lost Aela on a Saturday, mid-morning, four weeks ago. One minute she was running along the path we have walked a thousand times and the next she was gone. She was a puppy, four years old, and her last minutes on this planet—at least the ones before drowning—were spent leaping for a grouse she would never catch. Or not. Because we will never really know. She just vanished. When the clouds come down to to...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Listen: On this night, the house is an organ, an orchestra, a bellowing storm. The stream roars under a bridge and balconies, channeling into rapids, leaping and crashing onto boulders below. Nothing is silent this night—forested as dusk without sun, cloaked by rain that thunders as if to announce water is coming to find the path of least resistance, to find her way home. This is a home of water, falling water, falling everywhere: over flat roofs and cantilevered terraces, sculpted balcon...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
You stand on the deck of a forty-four-meter wooden pinisi-rigged boat somewhere in the Flores Sea, close to where the Komodo dragons live. A brochure claims that this boat, the Ombak Putih, was made by hand in accordance with the traditions of the South Sulawesi people. You will spend the next five days on board. Salt sparkles on your skin. A thin line of sweat traces your backbone into your butt crack. You are menstruating heavily. The sea swells under your feet. A crew member steadies you, ...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
of crows, they who first saw me at the retreat: week in ohio, more than a little death at my heels. five or six of them, the crows, perched and rattling a dead-top tree, cackled me down a good morning (returned). a good morning (returned) is what I am seeking; that elusive memory of sunup unhaunted by husband daniel. seeking that breeze unbothered, but there are hornets in ohio too, late june, that inject death their own ways. in my attic room one made a brooch of itself, pi...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
A door opens onto a wall. A window is trapped behind another.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Current Issue / Issue 79 / May 2025 / Nonfiction| brevitymag.com
I don’t remember a time when men, young, elderly, or middle-aged, stranger, or familiar, didn’t randomly confide in me the most traumatic horrors of their reality. Is there something about my bespectacled face? My half-broken nose? Is it my beard? Is it too philosophic, should it be more fundamentalist? Or maybe it’s something subcutaneous, a subconscious sense, a kindred recognition.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
