Meg Elison

Winter is the best time to shoot photos in cemeteries. Depending on your luck and your location, you might be treated to dark, skeletal branches in the trees, snow falling…

A mausoleum? In this economy? A full-on shrine in my millennial one-bedroom starter apartment/retirement hovel? A pyramid? On my block in Brooklyn? It is just so inconvenient to try and…

I would never have been born if my older sister hadn’t died. Existence is a joke, and most of us aren’t here on purpose. Most of us can’t trace the…

The song poured out of the FM radio in my mom’s Datsun Z as we drove toward the California sunset. The car was older than me, the song was older than the car. A timeless child, born before the internet, I often had trouble placing events in time. I was too aware of alterity and the intentional reproduction of the past. I thought I Love Lucy was a new show made to look like the olden days in black and white; I didn’t know Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe” or anything else on the oldies station was playing to evoke a nostalgia for people my mother’s age to recall their own youth. Mine was just beginning, and the world was new

David died on a day so ordinary that I couldn’t find it on the calendar when I looked back. We knew David was going to die. He had been ignoring…

I am most keenly aware of the nearness of death when I’m on an airplane. I’m safe there; I know that in the logical sense. But the sensation of exposure…

Bootheels clacking on the sidewalk. Cloak or duster flying behind. Eyes shaded by the brim of a black hat or a pair of dark glasses…or maybe by the darkness of…