Like toddlers in a damp sandbox, people have been experimenting with what they can put on their faces from day one. Sometimes this works, like with carmine, a red pigment that’s made from crushed cochineal beetles that is still used today. Other times, it is less successful, like with radium, which makes your face glow up until the point where it melts off.
Jadai Bergolla Echevarría Alonso is an emerging fiction writer and personal essayist whose topics of interest include Latinx-American rights, the Latinx diaspora, feminism, human rights, and diversity in media. She is left-handed and really wants the world to know that left-handed scissors are a damn joke. She also spiritually identifies with Oscar Isaac's mustache.
When we were sailing I felt borne up by wings capable of taking me much farther than I’d ever thought possible, to places where I could watch the storm petrels glide before the rising and falling walls of waves. Where a calm night’s watch was spent watching the swirling bioluminescence in our wake while trying to think of the ways and whys I could and should steer my professional life away from the noise and…
I have researched and explored the lives and experiences of English women and men who faced fertility problems in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. I have become so immersed in their world that a friend who is a modern day OB/GYN teases me that I talk about my historical subjects as though they were patients.
So they said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please, let us go three days’ journey into the desert and offer skin to the Lord our God, lest He fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.”
Exodus 8:25
Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron, and said, “Go, give skin to your God in the land.”
In Queens, on my way to the train, I swipe my Metrocard at the turnstile. I go through, just like I have a million times before. I’m halfway up the stairs when I hear someone yell, “Hey!”
My stomach drops at the sight of the cop staring at me.
We Have Always Lived In The Castle
is a book about what would happen if everyone wanted to murder everyone else all of the time. All of the meals eaten therein are either poisoned or should have been. Here all of those meals are, in order of their sinister undertones.
