Photo by Jessica Kirkwood
RENA GRAHAM
Writer
Creative Nonfiction
Fish Bones
Written for Galiano Literary Festival, July 2026. Unpublished.
Not available at this time.
Meeting Marcus
Written for Galiano Writers Read at the Library, May 2026. Unpublished.
Not available at this time.
Pier One Promises
She was sitting on the counter in the girls' bathroom at the gym, her short, blond hair so sun-bleached that it matched the cigarette dangling from her mouth. To cope with the sweltering Louisiana heat, her faded maroon gym suit had been cut to a dangerously tight minimum. A long, slow drag gave her time to assess the stranger standing at the door before she said, “My name’s Candy Cain. And who might you be?”
I’d just arrived from big-city Houston and been handed someone else’s gym suit. It hung to my knees. I covered the inked-in name, which made it look as if I’d put my hand to my heart in some sort of salute. “Rena. I’m new here.” It was a well-rehearsed response.
Better Red Than Blue
A month after I return from Singapore, my friend Ginene and I are slumped in her car in the rain. We’re lined up to board a ferry that will glide across Puget Sound from Seattle and take us to a very different island. Bainbridge, roughly ten percent the size of Singapore, appears in front of us through silvery mist. The gentle berm of green, sandwiched between the grey palette of water and sky is dark and dense in a way that tells me anything with color will be trapped underground for months.
Since coming back, I’ve felt something missing from my world and can’t figure out what it is. It’s left me with an itch and a sadness that occupies land somewhere between irritability and melancholy.
Nymph Skin
Our nights were full of cicadas. We called them tree crickets. Their sound like dancing gypsies, arms raised high, castanets rhythmically clicking. While climbing trees, I’d be startled by the nymph skins left behind from their nocturnal molting. I’d grasp onto a hidden part of the tree, crunch down on a brown empty shell, and quickly pull my hand away. Cicadas live mostly underground, emerging in late summer. In living out their insect destiny, they leave a translucent, crackly version of themselves behind, before flying off into the world fully formed.
No Roses in Roseville
We held my mother’s wake in a Chinese restaurant in Roseville, California. Had she been Chinese, this might be less strange.
She died in a prefab home reeking of plastic and cigarettes. Decades earlier, she and my father had proudly shown me around their new double wide in a manicured senior’s park outside Sacramento. I’d wondered if they would ever get rid of that factory smell. Every surface made to look like something it was not, in a town called Roseville where there were no roses.
