When I was a girl, I dreamt, often, of putting my hand to my face and feeling the roughness of stubble. When I was an even younger girl, so young that I might have even been genderless, those years when all is permitted, no top at the beach, no difference between us (no, even then I was a girl), my father would let us shave with him. A puffy handful of Barbasol. My brother and I would dab it on our cheeks until we had beards of soft white nothing. Our father would remove the cartridges from two razors, the old kind, the kind they do not sell anymore, the kind even he does not use anymore, silver metal, round handle, single blade. Then my brother and I would sit on the counter, our father between us, the mirror barely big enough for our three faces, and proceed to shave. My empty swipes taking away lines of foam. The serious skrtch skrtch of my father’s strokes. Gradually, gradually, our faces would emerge.

Now I am a guy, and I dream, sometimes, of tucking my hair behind my ear.

On “vape” as the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year:

I can think of few things about which I care less.

My favorite story about my mom is not a flattering one, but it is one that I tell most people who don’t know her. It involves her attempting to leapfrog the security counter at JFK airport to the horror of a Delta Airlines employee.

I was eleven years old and coming home from a summer in Pakistan. Mom met me in New York, and the plan was to fly the rest of the way together. Except the name on my passport and the name on my ticket didn’t match. My first name is Ali, but my passport lists it as Syed though that is more of a family name tracing our lineage to the Prophet Muhammad. The name discrepancy between my passport and ticket was small, but to Delta, I was somebody else. For Karen Haider, this was unacceptable.

Stacey May Fowles’ previous work for The Toast can be found here. This is her first piece for The Butter.

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Women’s stories, the reality of our lives too often appears to have no value to the reading public, who it seems don’t want to read such boring, painful stuff. Really? We can dismiss the reality of women’s lives so easily? Unless there is a major groundswell of women’s and children’s stories that are taken seriously in all sectors of society, I can’t see how we will make any progress defeating the excesses of patriarchy and all that this means in women’s lives. 

—Elly Danica, September 2014

In 1988, after years of distance from a childhood of vicious abuse, Elly Danica published Don’t at the age of forty-one. It is a lean, tight memoir written in a jagged prose poetry style—her first book, and the result of many years of journaling about her father’s relentless physical, sexual, and verbal assaults. “I decided when I was nine years old that I would try to find a way to tell the story of what happened to me, so that someone would know,” she writes via email from her present home in Nova Scotia. “It took me until my late 30’s to find my voice, but the promise I made to my nine year old self was the driving force all those years.” Though largely forgotten, the end result of that promise Danica made to her young self is arguably one of the finest memoirs in Canadian literature.