Gabriella Paiella's previous work for The Toast can be found here. I had a nice childhood. I didn’t want for much, save for three things that my parents refused to budge on. They were, ordered by the magnitude of associated tantrums that I threw: 1. an Easy-Bake Oven 2. an American Girl Doll 3. a movie ticket to Spice World I eventually came to understand that my first two white whales were just exorbitantly…
Mary J. Breen's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
My old piano sits in the corner of the dining room. No one but my grandson ever plays it, and he only when he wants to show me something new he’s learned. Visitors always marvel at its marquetry flower baskets and its carved mahogany, and they’re right; it’s a lovely thing. However, for me, it’s more than that. For me,
Samantha Powell's previous work for The Toast can be found here. I didn’t know that November 29th, 2013 would be my final Black Friday working in retail. I did know that for the first time in ages I was going to buy something on that day, although it wouldn't be a gift for someone else. It would be one for myself. The business cards arrived not long after I placed the order using the…
I used to be a regular at the pet store on the second floor of my local mall, down by Sears. Whenever I had to go with my mom to run errands, at the end of our quest, I would drag her to the pet shop. I gaped at the squirmy puppies – all cartilage – and kittens no more than eyes and fluff, along with the usual sickly goldfish and colorful, preachy birds. What…
I had been living in North Carolina for five years before anyone told me that Dirty Dancing was filmed at Lake Lure, a summery vacation spot just a couple of hours away from me. This information was shocking, like learning that God resided quite nearby and was up for visitors.
I got out my atlas and circled the blue dot with a pencil. Just a small circle, so I could find
When I was eight and my brother Eric was five we crashed a school bus. Actually, he crashed the bus, I was just a passenger. It was right before the start of summer. The row of buses on the grassy ball-field that doubled as a parking lot were being cleaned and tuned up for the start of camp. We dashed in and out of them – me, Eric, and another little girl, the toddler
My mother wanted to stay in America. She would say later that when she got off the plane, she felt like even the air in America was free. My father thought we should go back to China. After all, the Chinese government had given him the scholarship to come to America to get his PhD, and he was supposed to go back and use his knowledge to help the motherland. This was the
Cut off their hair and sell it to a wizard or something Designate a single door in your house Forbidden. If they open it, lock them in the attic for seven years. Turn some, but not all, of your children into swans. Build them a tree house, only instead of a tree it's a hundred-foot high nest of thorns, and also they have to live in there, and also they're never allowed out and no…
1. When you wear a home-made, puffed-sleeve, colonial-esque, lace-front dress, styled after your Felicity doll, to every Bible study your mom attends in the 3rd grade and wonder why the other kids aren’t taking your suggestion to form a Harriet-the-Spy spy club seriously. 2. When you realize the hand-me-down jeans you’ve been proudly wearing for all of 5th grade belonged to your male cousin, not your female cousin. No wonder the crotch area…
Before we parted ways at the airport, my mother handed me an envelope. From its size I knew that it held a greeting card, but its thickness revealed that there was something hidden in between those cardboard words of farewell. She told me to open it. Inside there was money, which I half expected. I knew that she wouldn’t be able to help herself even though I told her that there would be no need…
My father molested me. He wasn’t the worst molester in the world, or even a particularly dedicated one (his other interests - choir, hiking, his compost heap – got in the way), but he did it and two years ago I told the police. I learned a lot that year. For example, did you know that a sex offender isn’t necessarily charged according to the most current Sexual Offences Act? They’re charged according to the…
This post was brought to you by A Misandrist. In fifth grade, my class studied the Salem Witch Trials as part of the social studies curriculum. This was a terrible thing to teach in middle school in the early 2000s, just as Sabrina was losing its cool and before Rookie’s articles about witchy style icons and Tumblr covens would make being a witch admirable, even aspirational. Witches weren’t empowered femmes with sweet magic powers…
Dylan and Katherine are a brother and sister who discovered they had independently written different poems on the same topic. After The Men Are Dead Katherine Seitel After the men are dead the women find comfort in one another. Margaret’s went first. He had a bad heart and died young, just 40-years-old. He built, lovingly, a doghouse in the backyard and left four child sized noses, sniffling, and two adult female hands, wringing in grief…
We had sworn we were done with Harry Potter pieces, but we liked this one so much we had to have it just the same. Enjoy it: it's the last one we'll run in 2014. Here is a thing I believe about stories: the best have a life of their own. When you are in a story—whether you are reading it or writing it—it will tell you what it wants. The stories I love best,…
If there was one thing I envied about Laura Ingalls Wilder (besides the fact that making molasses candy in the snow was something I was never going to experience as an elementary schooler in Honolulu, Hawaii), it was that she had such keen survival skills. Waking up at the crack of dawn and sleeping on straw weren’t exactly my cup of tea, but that girl could churn butter and fashion her own dolls and understood…
