Short Story

With food deserts on the rise, thirty-three point eight million Americans experienced food insecurity in 2021.  A food desert is an area lacking cheap and healthy food, leading people to take a long time out of their day to find adequate food. The “deserts” impact communities all around our country and affect many people’s lives daily. Food deserts cause a lack of healthy food and many problems like obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Solutions

Pickup, the end of the day. Freedom from the nightmare known as school. I tremble, my hands squeezing the straps of my book bag tight. Nobody could pry my hands off of the dark blue, rough and smooth straps. They were locked in place. My eyes scan the entrance of the building, the bronze brick walls towering over students' heads. Scanning across the clearing one more time to be sure, my eyes detect no threats. No kids, that would hurt. I breathe deeply and push open the glass

The airplane landed on the hard tarmac of the airport. As I sat in my seat, anxious to get out of the plane, looking out of the window at the vast Australian climate. The landscape was gorgeous, the golden sunlight lighting up the hills as the native animals flocked freely. Waiting patiently as we drove down the gravel road towards my grandparent’s farm. The smell of the earth was fresh, a smell you could only dream of. My Granny was waiting on the porch, waiting to greet us,

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota at around 7am with the beating hospital fluorescent light in my face. Doctors scramble to make sure everything is okay, do I weigh more than I’m supposed to? Too little? Is my mom doing okay? I can’t imagine what that was like since after all I couldn’t remember any of it, I had just been born. Sometimes I think about what I was doing when I was little since I can’t remember my memories from before the age of 3 or 4. My mom said I would sp

Puhhk! Puhkk! As college students in the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music briskly walked through the expansive halls, their dress shoes clapped against the porcelain tiles, producing an echoing thunder. Despite bearing towering instrument cases on their meager bodies, they glided through the building with a grace comparable to nature’s songbirds. Watching them as a tiny six-year-old, I could not help but hang my mouth ajar and tilt my head with burning curiosity. Outside the

Budhh– Budhh–Budh! Blood surged into my head from all over my body, leaving a tingling sensation in my arms and legs. I blinked away the moisture that had built up on my eyelashes. In the darkness of the night, cars sped through the streets, weaving through the sea of Metro buses and stopped taxi cabs. People who crowded on the littered concrete walked briskly, navigating the corners and edges of the city. My brother and I stood in the middle of it all like red oak trees in a

When the clock reads midnight, pixie dust's glowing colors flutter into the deep, inky sky. Their traces are abruptly gone until the light spreads its wings again, reaching across the stars and staining them with a boom of dyes that are soon left to fall to their demise. Noises of all kinds, the sounds of lips meeting others, kids screaming into the icy air, and adult chatter explode in my ears. I am disconnected from the chaos, liveliness, and energy that surrounds me. Inste

Danville, Illinois, is not just another small town in Illinois; it's a place where memories are made, from taking your first steps to...

Rain pounded the glass windows of the speeding train. The soaking landscape outside blurred by as we moved along the tracks. Green fields...

The sky was blue as far as my eye could see, and there was not a smidge of white to tarnish it. It was the kind of day that you would see...

It was a late night in Berlin in 1923; the factory hadn't been doing well because of the extreme hyperinflation. The factory hasn’t even...

I’ve been chasing you for so long. My heavy footsteps cast destruction to the earth. The air holds in a breath as my lethal cancer...

There are places on Earth where time seems to stretch, bending like the curves of the hills that roll away into the horizon. Italy is one of them. For the summer of 2022, I had the privilege of becoming a part of its timeless dance, where every cobblestone seemed to whisper a secret, and every sunset bled into a symphony of colors. To say that I visited Italy would be like saying that I dipped a toe into the ocean — it was an immersion, a deep plunge into a culture, a landsca

Half Price Books: a gold mine for a voracious reader. In grade school, those aisles filled with used books were my weekend getaway. I...