What you don’t know about is the picnic table. It was, when I was growing up, our breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. School nights, it was my homework table. When he was sleeping off a drunk, it was a bed for my Old Man. A log leg, second hand picnic table with split board bench […]
Featured Nonfiction
He Started It
Nothing but Ice Gravel
by Brittany Ackerman
On the way through, clasp your fists around the universe: Nothing but ice-gravel. But open your hands when you reach the other side. Quickly, before it melts. – “Love Letter (Clouds)” Sarah Manguso I. Nick was married but I met him at the park anyway. We sat on a bench that faced a manmade lake. […]
Freeing Lucy
by Alyssa Witbeck
They named me Lucy on March 3rd. Dressed in white (dress, socks, slippers), I clutched a lacy sack of sacred clothing while I followed the small congregation from room to room of the Mormon temple. I entered a closet-like space, the place they name people in, the room that launches a person from who they […]
Kitchen Notes for Oldest Daughters Who Were Never Taught to Cook
by Amanda Roth
Chocolate Cake Ingredients ▢ 1½ cups all-purpose flour ▢ ¼ cup unsweetened childhood memories, thoroughly sifted ▢ ⅓ cup vegetable oil (an oldest daughter) ▢ 1 cup water (her mother) ▢ 1 teaspoon white vinegar (her father) ▢ 1 cup sugar or artificial sweetener (see also: the way the parents act differently in public) ▢ […]
The Poetry Reading
by Karli Petrovic
My friend Jess wrote a pocket-sized book of poetry I carried in my purse for many years. A blank black cover with white font, No Subject, Just Reflection found its home among loose change, random pens, elusive hair ties and the pink Motorola flip phone that hung out in my increasingly tattered tote bag. The […]
I Want to Cut Off My Pinky Finger
by Colin Punt
I do not believe I am making an outlandish claim when I say most people do not often think about their pinky fingers. I similarly believe I think about mine, or at least my left pinky finger, far more than most, and perhaps nearly all people, because I want to cut off my pinky finger. […]
The Warrior Is In The Building
by Kelly Piggott
This won’t be on the news. Ten minutes after the announcement, with the classroom door slammed shut and the desks stacked in front of the door, I realized one important fact about the hard lockdown: it wasn’t a drill. Six middle-school girls—one from the previous period finishing a test, five working on a quiz for […]
Broat
by Jennie Ziegler
[1944, The Ardennes] The buzzing performed nightly. Quiet could settle thick as a tongue onto an uncleared field. In the mornings, men would climb out from the earth like beetles, like living things, to see if someone had left food for their snow-lined stomachs. Or news. Deep in the waking woods, a Midwestern boy huddled […]
Revision
by Lior Torenberg
I’ve never been able to write about a particular heartbreak that occurred over five years ago, and so I enlisted the help of AI to do so. I was inspired to do this by Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts” (published in The Believer in 2021) in which she does the same in order to help process […]
MAYDAY Staff Poll: Best “Break Up With the Job” Films
The MAYDAY staff propose their favorite break-up-with-the-job films and TV shows. Celebrate spring by quitting! Or, rather, vicariously quitting through “Office Space.”
