True Florida Stories
It’s 6:50 a.m. in a nondescript Dunnellon shopping center. Street lights and neon store signs cast a dim glow over the dark lot and Publix won’t open for another ten minutes.
The parking lot is almost empty, except for the scattering of cars belonging to the members of the Workout Anytime gym and those of a group of 14 old men sitting along the benches outside of the Breakfast Station restaurant … Read moreThe ROMEOs
A grizzled man smoking a cigarette in his Confederate flag adorned pickup truck was the first time I saw a Florida stereotype in the flesh … Read moreWarming up
At an ungodly 7:30 a.m., Noor Sukkar logged into Advanced Placement chemistry, her first subject of the school day and the last she’d ever label promising when delivered via online lecture … Read moreFrom Brooklyn to the brink
Growing up in a coastal town in Venezuela, I would often hear a story about an elderly woman known by others to be a witch. At night, she transformed into a large white bird and sneakily hid in the trees, waiting for dawn to break before returning to its human form … Read moreMagical, real
To know me is to know the color of my bedroom walls. Not the ones in my college apartment, so plastered in torn magazine covers and fading photo booth strips and stolen Home Depot paint swatches that the beige underneath is barely an afterthought. The ones in my South Florida bedroom, where I started high school and turned 18 and drafted my graduation speech in the dead of night … Read moreRaised on sunshine, addicted to the rays