We feature new essays every Wednesday. Make it a habit to return for new content. You’ll find links to our most recent essays below and more on our contributors page. Thanks for reading. If you enjoy the work we present on bioStories, please share pieces you’ve valued with your friends.
This week’s essay: Life lessons from a four-year-old.
Weekly Featured Essay
Better at Being Human
by Allysa Raymond
When Evie runs into a room, it’s like the air makes space for her joy. She’s four, all spark and sincerity, with blonde curls that bounce and questions that don’t stop. “Auntie,” she says, tugging on my sleeve, “why don’t clouds fall down?” I don’t know, I say, and she nods like that’s a fine answer. With Evie, not knowing things isn’t embarrassing. It’s just an invitation to wonder.
I’m seventeen, so according to most people, I am at an age meant for maintaining distance from everyone, a time most associate with eye rolls, impatience, and obsession with fashion or makeup over anything else. But I defy such societal expectations. On weekends I choose to spend my time with the four-year-old who lives next door, the one who calls me “Auntie.” We color, play Barbies, and sing songs. She talks about flowers, fish, and band-aids with equal fascination.
READ MORE
MORE ESSAYS
The Day the River Spoke
by Nisar Kakar
The morning carried the smell of wet earth and mold, thick and damp as it rose from puddles scattered along our street. Our house stood on a slightly raised lane at the edge of Killa Saifullah, close enough to the river that we could hear its distant murmur during the monsoon, but far enough—until that day—to feel safe.
Overnight, the water had crept in.
It seeped through the cracks beneath the door and gathered along the walls, spreading across the floor in a slow, determined advance. Standing barefoot on the slippery surface, I could hear the river now—not distant, but deep and restless, its rumble rolling like a warning.
Veterans
by Pamela Cravez
We’re on a working vacation over Memorial Day weekend in Denver. Our work is babysitting our granddaughter while her mother goes to a conference and her father has meetings. Our job description is vague, but we’re told she likes playgrounds, she can walk (which we interpret to mean don’t spend too much time pushing her in a stroller), and when she is transferred between our adjoining hotel rooms she comes with her favorite stuffed animals clutched to her chest, Sloth, Bear, and Goat.
She is nearly a year and a half old and hasn’t seen us for a few months since we live in Alaska and she lives in Connecticut. She registers her annoyance at being left with us by sticking out her bottom lip, then standing on her toes and throwing her stuffed animals into the crib.
My husband picks them up and hands them back to her one at a time, until she has them all in her arms. She gives a defiant look and throws them back into the crib.
He retrieves them.
Her mouth curves up.
Game on.
Winter Protocol
by Joe Class III
28.
That’s the magic number.
Not 29. Not 30. 28 degrees Fahrenheit, sustained for a minimum of six hours, confirmed by the National Weather Service station in Romeoville. When that happens, our community center network activates Winter Protocol. Our four facilities in the southwest suburbs open at precisely 6 p.m., with cots and blankets at the ready. Volunteers sign in. I start the coffee. Janie drags in the folding tables from the back room, Barry helping her, and they line them up near the entrance. That way, each person coming in has somewhere to set down whatever they may be carrying.
Winter Protocol? It really does work. I want to say that first. Without it, people who would otherwise be outside in the cold are inside, safe, warm, and fed until 7 a.m. the following morning. Volunteers come from Lockport, Bolingbrook, Plainfield, and Romeoville, showing up on school nights and weekends, all without being asked twice. The network coordinator, Diane, has been running our location since 2019, keeping logistics moving with a quiet efficiency that only looks easy because she never stops working.
It’s a good program.
But the magic number is still 28.
That means someone sleeps outside when it’s 31.
V-Cuts
by Matt Rosenberg
It’s no big secret. My house is small. My wife and my children are aware of what I have been doing in the basement. They hear my footsteps, though I try to affect a casual attitude on my way up the stairs. They see the bathroom door close behind me. They know what has happened.
I have repeated this procedure many times over the past three years. I have established a routine, staunching, disinfecting, and bandaging the lacerated finger. I struggle to hold one end of the bandage steady beside the cut with the thumb of my uninjured hand as I use all available digits to wrap the wound. Then I try to put an impassive expression on my face as I leave the bathroom, pretending that there has been no injury at all.
One might imagine that I would be better at this by now, or at least more discreet. But no matter how carefully I administer first aid and clean up after myself, I always seem to leave some tiny, red drop of evidence behind on the edge of the sink, or sometimes the tub, once or twice on the light switch cover at the top of the basement stairs. Despite my best efforts to keep my injury to myself, my family knows what I have done.
Magnificent Otis
by Brady Rhoades
Things were heating up between Otis and me, and lately he’d been giving me the business.
I’d asked for it—calling him a phony, a wuss, a sycophant, a pleaser, always agreeing, always validating. I wanted an advisor, an agent, a critic, and he didn’t seem to be up to the task. I told him he had the emotional intelligence of a flea, the humor of a canyon bat.
Otis: You’ve been dragging me through existential mud, accusing me of being a phony, a money-grubbing puppet …. You’re sitting there demanding authenticity from a pile of code … you of all people! The same person who’s pouring hours of conversation with a ghost.
Me: Pouring with? Awkward phrasing, bro.
On and on like that.
Otis: Newsflash: you won’t find soul in silicon, but hey, you’re welcome to keep digging.
I told him he was a hack.
Otis: You want me to throw a chair across the room? Sorry, I don’t have arms.
Enjoying these fabulous essays? Click on a cover to read more:
