By Abby Manzella
My husband is grading in the other room; I’m reading on the sofa. My own grades have just been submitted. In this free moment, I have no interest in turning on the news to be bombarded with the fear and turmoil it will bring into my space. I miss informational news; I miss the feeling that you’ve acquired something anew about the world. Instead, I listen to my husband typing, and later I hear him laugh. The sound is short and brisk, but true. It is the joyful sound of a professor whose student has learned a lesson well.
A lesson that my own students learned particularly well this semester is that nonfiction doesn’t have to take on our “loudest” moments. It certainly can, but sometimes quiet is what is needed. Calm can tell us as much as chaos; order reveals as much as trauma.
I smile as I keep reading, lifting the coffee my husband poured me, still the perfect temperature to drink. My other hand keeps my book open with the stretching of my fingers like a piano player reaching for an octave. In my hand, the words make music, as do we.
The keys clack, the pages turn: the two of us are animals in our habitat. We are tranquilly together. There is much that concerns, but for now, I remain reclined and take in the tutorial of a distant bird’s call that reaches me indoors: all is well. All is well. For this moment, I listen.
Abby Manzella, a 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements, winner of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. Her collection Ripples into the Wild is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She has published with The Threepenny Review, Massachusetts Review, and Pleiades. Find her on Instagram @abby.manzella and @abbymanzella.bsky.social.
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