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Massif Magazine
Non-Fiction
Prose writing that is based on facts, real events, and real people, such as biography or history.
My First Thanksgiving
Tiana Penczar
The wooden table sat nine, including myself, and the weight of Thanksgiving food rendered it unmovable. One set of seating arrangements included my aunt, her son, her boyfriend, and his daughter, all placed on a wooden bench three shades lighter than the table. I offered to let my cousin sit to my right. She had no place to rest her arms on the cushioned dining room chair, and for a moment, I envied her as my father’s armed chair smashed uncomfortably into mine.
I Wasn't Yours
Payton Doughty
I’m sorry that you thought that this friendship was ever a competition. I never meant to make you feel unheard. Every time I said something back, I was trying to comfort you. Maybe you don’t feel the same way — I don’t. I didn’t. You left me with a message. — I don’t like confrontation. I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I asked you to meet me face-to-face. I just had so many questions and you’ve only given me that answer. Maybe I should’ve given you a little bit more time just to complain. I would’ve never talked about what happened to me if it meant that you would stay. If it has made you feel heard, I would’ve stayed quiet.
Perfect Me
Payton Doughty
There’s not a lot of things that I hate more than sitting in a room full of extended family that I don’t know. I tug on my pencil skirt.
How old was I? 17? 18? I know I was a senior in high school. Gage was 17, already in cahoots with the Army recruiter and so excited. I was 18 then, freshly out of the closet to my parents.
Gage knocked against my shoulder with a cheeky smile, “How are you feeling?” I wanted to shove him away, call him an ass for teasing me for my unwillingness to be there, but there was a line that I couldn’t cross in front of these people. I rolled my eyes, “I’d hate you if I could.”
Amnesia
Brooklyn Christofis
A few months back, I watched the Twilight movies with my college roommates. As the blue-hued flashes progressed–the scene centering around someone that looks like Bella Swan’s mom and something surrounding a conversation about college–a familiar sight caught my eye. A t-shirt quilt blanket that I both knew all too well and not at all.
I am Not a Car Girl
Karissa Sweet
We cruised through the Target parking lot. It was 10:45 p.m. in the middle of February in Denver, but still the lanes were filled with GTIs, Volkswagen Jettas, Infinitis, Genesises, anything you can think of. They were all show cars: souped-up engines, lowered at least three inches, fins, waste gaskets, booming exhausts. I turned my head to the right as I listened and watched a Honda perform a burnout to make their engine pop like gunshots. Groups of people, mainly boys around my age, walked up and down the aisles looking at the cars, asking people to pop their car hoods to look at the engines. The vibe was like one of those “coming of age” movies you watch in high school, which was fitting because I felt like I was still in high school every time I went there.
Bigstuf
Karissa Sweet
Where is that frisbee? It has to be here somewhere, I wouldn’t just throw out something like that.
I shot straight up from my hunched position, my back aching from ripping my room to shreds. I found an array of treasures: my first ID my mother made me get at age eight so we could fly to Florida to meet my dad’s parents, my 7th grade school ID, my ladybug CD case I’ve had ever since I could remember, my Lilo costume I wore just a few months back for Halloween. Hell, I even found my old Justin Bieber and Big Time Rush calendars–why did I keep those? But, no frisbee. Why can’t I find this fucking frisbee?
Juni is Autistic and Juni is Proud
Juni Brown
My name is Juni. It is spelled starting with jun- and ending with an -i with no e. Juni is unique, both in spelling and in names. When it is typed, computers will either always mark it wrong, or autocorrect it into something like “June bug” or “junk.” This is what my 5th grade science teacher told me. Almost everyone starts off by thinking it is spelled with an e. But the way it sounds with a long u and an i that sounds like a long e creates a flow of cuteness, and confidence. Juni can make you think of a cute young girl who’s cute and shy in public, yet confident enough to get tons of work done.
What Literature Means to Me
Callia Lopez
Literature, to me, is a work that expresses one’s opinions and thoughts in a cohesive unit. This is very definitive, but that’s what I think. Reports are not literature in my mind: they are reports, research, facts outlined and stated succinctly and coherently. You can learn a lot from a report. However, you can learn just as much, and maybe more, from a work of literature that uses those facts as the basis for the writing around it.
Travel Journal
Chloe Felker
We met in Norwich, a small country town near the eastern British coastline, the entire city center walkable in a matter of fifteen minutes. I was nervous the first time we talked. It had been two weeks since my plane left SFX, and though I hadn’t looked back, the loneliness of knowing nobody in a country that felt like a new world entirely was starting to weigh on me... All that mattered was that I would know her. A lifetime from then, twenty years down the line, this was a friend I would tell my children about... And that was it.
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