February 19, 2025 First Person I Killed Wolf’s By Todd McEwen A history of sandwiches. Drawing by Todd McEwen. It was California, so, sandwiches. I sat by the window overlooking Balfour Avenue, at our kitchen table. Its plastic cloth, gray, with a fringe of white yarn. (How did she ever wash that thing?) My mother was moving between the sink and the stove, framed in the doorway to the dining room. Outside was a big lantana with orange moths in it. I remember this as the time when we started to talk to each other a lot. Was I four? I said to her that I was glad I didn’t have to go to school yet. “Oh, yeah?” she said. The sandwich dear to me in those days was Monterey Jack with mayonnaise and lettuce on Van de Kamp’s sliced white bread. MY WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN MAYONNAISE There was a perverse ancillary reason that I liked this sandwich: an ancient cartoon that returned again and again, on Sheriff John’s Lunch Brigade on KTTV, which I never missed. In this, one of the hundreds and thousands of characters from the early days of commercial animation—Sparky? Inky? Horny? Drecky?—ate a sandwich that looked like mine and smacked his lips loudly while he did it. Of course, I could only smack my sandwich this way when I was in front of the TV and my mother was out of the room, and out of earshot. But it did make it taste better. A grilled cheese sandwich, made on our aluminum griddle with the rounded corners. Same bread, same cheese. Maybe Tillamook cheddar once in a while. Perfect. Golden. A big hand for my mom, folks. Honey sandwiches. Van de Kamp’s white bread, butter, and Sue Bee whipped honey. I still have a horror of honey you squeeze out of a bear. I liked peanut butter and jelly. Everyone does. But while Welch’s grape jelly was the national standard, I accidentally discovered that I also liked peanut butter and Rose’s lime marmalade, something my parents had around from a trip to Canada. What a little snob! But you should try it. I liked baloney OK, but I really liked liverwurst. My father was particular to call it braunschweiger. Oscar Meyer, or, better, Farmer John. My dad would add raw onion. A step too far for me at that time. But when I later encountered the liverwurst sandwiches at McSorley’s, packed with onion and mustard that blows your head off, I found that I was, in fact, prepared. Read More
February 18, 2025 First Person More from Scraps By Abdulah Sidran Ann Craven, Moon (Paris Review Roof, NYC, 9-19-24, 8:40 PM), 2024, 2024, oil on linen, 14 x 14″. From our Winter issue, no. 250. Abdulah Sidran (1944–2024) was born to a family of Bosnian Muslims during the occupation of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Croatian fascist Ustaše. After World War II, the region became, under Tito, a part of the new socialist republic of Yugoslavia, and Sidran’s father, Mehmed Sidran, became a Communist Party functionary. After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet-led alliance known as Cominform, Mehmed became one of the suspected Soviet sympathizers arrested en masse by Tito’s government. The following excerpt recounts a “family meeting” in the years after Sidran’s father returned from his imprisonment in the forced-labor camp of Goli Otok, a formerly uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea. You can read more of the Review’s selections from Sidran’s memoir, Scraps, in our new Winter issue, no. 250. The roof was leaking again. Dad stopped coming home, and Mom lined the floor with bowls and pots and pans and other dishes everywhere the water was dripping. Because the water dripped so much, Mom got up in the night to empty the containers and returned them to the same places. We always heard when she got up in the night, and we knew what she was doing as soon as she put the dishes back and the drops of water sounded different, falling into the now empty containers. The worst was when the roof leaked over our beds. We had to move them wherever and however just so the water wouldn’t drip on them. Mom said, My God, what have I done wrong? Whenever we heard Mom crying at night, we knew Dad had come home. Mom said, At least don’t wake the kids. Can you promise? Dad pretended not to hear her and said, Conference. Women to the other room. So we had to get up and go over to the table, and Mom took Dina to the other room. Dad sat at the table and cracked his knuckles. Ekrem, Edo, and I sat in silence, waiting for Dad to talk. Dad said, Lest you think I’m drunk, Ekrem will lead the meeting. Ekrem asked what was the agenda, even though it was nighttime, and then Dad took the floor and spoke about his life and communism. You boys will live to the year 2000. By then communism must prevail, you got that? We got that even though we were sleepy. Have you read Germinal, he asked me, and I lied that I had. He told us how he’d gone to school with nanule on his feet and how we had no right to ask for anything beyond that, even though we didn’t ask for anything. While talking, Dad walked around the room, and then he sat down again at the table or on the couch. When he waved a hand from the couch, we knew the meeting was over. To these meetings, he always brought new words. Always a different one. One night he kept saying pretermit, others, permanently or withdrawal. We didn’t know what those words meant, but we used them to tell one conference from another. Ekrem said, You know, that night he kept sayin’ competent. I said, I know. Mom was crying in the other room, but you could barely hear it because she held a pillow over her face. Dina asked, Why are you crying, Mom? We’ll be happy one day, too. Everyone has to be happy one day. Mom said, When the soil covers me, that’s when I’ll be happy. Read More
February 13, 2025 First Person Love, Beyond Recognition By Benjamin Ehrlich Marc Lehwald, The Mirror Project, Keukenhof, the Netherlands, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and I remember a rare, if not completely novel, feeling of independence. Turning a corner, I saw a man wearing glasses and light-wash jeans, with a brown beard and brown hair, standing with his back toward me, facing the shelves. He looked exactly like my father. I hugged him around his legs. When the man turned around, I realized that he was not my father but rather another man, a stranger, whom I had mistaken for my father. And the stranger seemed displeased with my affection. I exploded into tears. This is not only my first memory but also my first experience of terror. Lately, I have been having nightmares in which my ex-girlfriend J.—whom I was with, off and on, for more than ten years—treats me like a stranger. These dreams are so disturbing that I wake up from them in the middle of the night. I write them in my journal as soon as possible: Read More
February 11, 2025 First Person Briefly a Hawk By Sam McPhee Photograph by Sam McPhee. I live with my family in the mountains of western Montana, near the small railroad town of Alberton. A week ago I found a dead hawk on my front porch. Flight feathers and bristle had been torn from the body, and scatters of down were fluttering in place or tumbling away, light as ash. But there was no blood anywhere, not even on the carcass. My five-year-old daughter, June, was there with me. We were on our way out to the car, on our way to school. The morning sunlight was rich and cold. Then I saw a tiny down feather dabbed to the pane of one of our front windows. A point of impact. How sad, June said. Yes. It’s rare to see a hawk up close, I told her. We looked at the bird for a moment, as if to pay it our respects. When I returned home an hour later, the hawk was still there on the porch. No scavenger had come for it. I called a taxidermist in Frenchtown. He was driving when he answered my call, and his truck was full of wind. He shouted his hello. I asked him if he did birds, and he said, Yeah, laughing to himself, I do birds. But when I told him the bird was a hawk, he said, Let me stop you right there. I can’t touch that bird. You can’t touch it, either. I told him that it flew into my window. The hawk will just go to waste, I said. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, I would love to do it for you, and his voice was different now, almost mournful. But I can’t touch a hawk. Read More
January 20, 2025 First Person My Cat Mii By Mayumi Inaba Photograph by Revolution will, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny-tiny baby kitten. Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck inside the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y. neighborhood of Fuchū City in western Tokyo. In which direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I’d followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first, I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot. The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging so high up that even on tiptoe I could barely reach her as she clung on for dear life. She had sharp, pointy ears, innocent glistening eyes, and a pink slit of a mouth, and she was puffing her body up as much as she could to stop herself from falling, looking down at me fearfully. It was obvious that she hadn’t dropped there out of nowhere or climbed up by herself, but had been put there deliberately, out of malice or mischief. “Come with me …” Read More
December 18, 2024 First Person Learning to Ice-Skate By Virginia Higa William Charles Anthony Frerichs, Ice Skating (1869), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. In Stockholm it didn’t snow on Christmas or New Year’s Eve or at the beginning of January. The days were gray and, in the afternoon, just before it got completely dark, there was often a dank glow that turned the sky brown. That December, we bought some cheap skates and went one night—in midwinter it’s most accurate to use the term one night even when describing something done during the day—to skate in Vasaparken, where they flood the grass pitches with water, turning them into a huge floodlit rink that never closes. I’d skated only a couple of times in my life and so many years ago that I’d lost any muscle memory my body might have had. Read More