Samantha Powell's previous work for The Toast can be found here. In my childhood and early adolescence, Boston was filled with movie theaters. Over time many of them shuttered as the city transformed from a place that felt like home to one that I had trouble recognizing. Most of those old theaters were hidden away. One neighbored a Chili’s in a corner of my local mall. Another sat tucked next to one of the…
The Toast will be running a few pieces on Canada's missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW) this summer; this is the first.
My seven siblings and I grew up in a Christian household, which was strict in some sense. We didn’t own a television, and we sat around the table to read The Bible every night and recited scripture. My sisters and I couldn’t wear pants or cut our hair. It might
Okay, so I only occasionally and sporadically encounter the following variations on pronunciation in the wild, and thus far they seem to have no rhyme or reason. They don't always go together; they're never associated with the same regional accent, and I cannot understand where it is that anyone learns to talk like this. It astonishes me. Can any of you shed some light on this for me? Pronouncing the word "humor" like "yoo-mor" (because,…
Previously in this series: "Snow White the False" Good morning class! Over the course of this semester, we have had the opportunity to examine, and sometimes reappraise, how different monarchical institutions have adapted to crises. These monarchies are, by their nature, conservative and generally do not change course in the absence of fairly drastic events, usually driven by external forces. A single person – even if that person wears the Crown – rarely has the…
The problem is, the decision is not two roads diverging in a yellow wood. It is two roads in the wood and a third you think you can see just out of the corner of your eye. It is a fourth dashing through the woods like a wolf. It is a fifth in the sky. It is a sixth in the ground. The problem is, it is not just the two roads diverging for all…
Learn that you are frivolous. You are told this on a Saturday by an editor who rejects your manuscript. You had submitted it six months ago, newly unemployed, giddily setting free your first submission as if getting sacked were really just a bohemian blessing. Now you learn that you are possibly worse than an idiot. Some TV show lauded for grittily glamorizing the lives of young urbanites might depict this scene in a bright coffee…
Amy first realized something was amiss in the third grade. There she was one minute, staring out of the window, thinking about the blueness of her classmate Jonah’s eyes, when suddenly a week had passed.
It always happened like that. She would lose herself in a daydream and then lose herself in real life. She’d imagine a comet hurtling towards the earth, laying waste to the school, then wake up a day later
Evan Lavender-Smith's previous work for The Butter can be found here. Tell your mother the roast is overdone. Tell your father he can start cooking for himself, if he likes. Tell your father he didn’t fix the ice maker right. Tell your mother I’m not a plumber. Tell your mother the laundry’s dry. Tell your father I’m not his maid.
It was always hard for me to watch things like this with you. You overreacted to everything on the news. I hated that about you. Every storm, every wildfire, every random shooting, every nighttime strangler, you acted as if seeing them on the news would somehow magically make them show up at our apartment door. You issued nonsensical warnings like “Be careful out there. They’re
Mary J. Breen's previous work for The Toast can be found here. Bill Zinsser, a prolific writer and a revered writing teacher, died last month on May 12; he was 92. He wrote newspaper and magazine articles on a remarkable number of topics, and he wrote books on jazz, travel, and baseball, but what he’s best known for are his eleven books about the craft of writing. His advice, especially in his bestseller…
Though I have not spoken to my father in almost four years, I still talk to him all the time, in vivid technicolor and exaggerated emotion. The landscape of sleep has always been visceral for me; my dreams often follow me into my waking hours, so real that I feel sure upon awakening that the things contained within my sleeping subconscious have been manifested into fact. The dreams I have about my father
Fortune's Wheel "I turn the whirling wheel and my circle spins. I am glad to change the lowest to the highest, and the highest to the lowest. Mount up if you will, provided you do so under this condition: that you will not maintain that I do you wrong though you descend down when the rules of my game require it." - Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy, 523 AD "No mortal power may stay…
When I first met my best friend, S, we were fifteen. We both immediately agreed that we wished, more than anything, that we’d been born boys. We spent hours, melted by the central California heat, sprawled in tall grass and eating chocolate bars, discussing exactly what we would do if we were men: places we would travel, risks we would take, sexual adventures we would have, mustaches we would grow. The main problem with being…
We're walking through a wash in the desert in the dark, and we're thirsty. We've been hiking since five a.m., and left our last water source a few hours after that. In the interim we climbed ten thousand feet cross-country up and over a ridge, stopping on top to look back down at our starting point in Death Valley, then hiked down the other side. The last of the light has long since gone. I'm…
First, your body must comply by having an ongoing issue that is not easily solved with a round of brutal antibiotics. Then you must prove that is not Just Depression or Just Anxiety or Just Your Questionable Life Choices that are making you ill or think you are ill. This is harder than it sounds. Find doctors through personal referrals, your ears perking up when you hear, “These are the doctors doctors use.” Apologize for…
