The Promise of a Flower
Eudora Welty’s Night-Blooming Cereus Club
Widowhood
A Confession
All that banging was happening inside my dream; yet it kept going. Insistent. Urgent.
I rolled over and squinted at the clock. 2:20 a.m. Someone was pounding on the front door. Ahhh, my husband forgot his key. He’s home, finally, from the college basketball game he’d flown down to Wake Forest to see. In darkness, I lurched down the hallway to let him in.
On my porch stood a young Fredericksburg cop. His cruiser was in the driveway, blue lights swirling in the night. I tugged my T-shirt down as far as it would go over my bare legs and wondered if I was in some kind of trouble.
NO MOSS?
For Hospital Corporation,
Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’
Comes to an End After 20 Years
(They’re Keeping the Building, Too)
Widowhood
A Confession
All that banging was happening inside my dream; yet it kept going. Insistent. Urgent.
I rolled over and squinted at the clock. 2:20 a.m. Someone was pounding on the front door. Ahhh, my husband forgot his key. He’s home, finally, from the college basketball game he’d flown down to Wake Forest to see. In darkness, I lurched down the hallway to let him in.
On my porch stood a young Fredericksburg cop. His cruiser was in the driveway, blue lights swirling in the night. I tugged my T-shirt down as far as it would go over my bare legs and wondered if I was in some kind of trouble.
The Promise of a Flower
Eudora Welty’s Night-Blooming Cereus Club
NO MOSS?
For Hospital Corporation,
Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’
Comes to an End After 20 Years
(They’re Keeping the Building, Too)
Deep Dives
NO MOSS?
For Hospital Corporation,
Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’
Comes to an End After 20 Years
(They’re Keeping the Building, Too)
No Moss?
For Hospital Corporation, Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’ Comes to an End After 20 Years
The Far-Right Spammers of Falmouth Bottom
Meet the Neighbors
The Right-Wing Spammers and Scriveners show up for work in the mornings just like anybody else, pulling off Washington Street in the tiny village of Falmouth, Virginia, squeezing through a narrow opening in a chain link fence, and parking in a gravel lot under a row of ivy-strangled oaks, three of them dying, one already dead. They drive a Toyota Prius with a turtle sticker on the back. Or a black SUV, or an older-model Camry, or any of a dozen other middle-class sedans. Nothing flashy, though one of their bosses, a bearded, balding, political marketer and Shriner potentate named Andrew Coelho keeps a Heritage Shrine Club trailer back there for ferrying around his lodge’s clown cars.
The Beavers of Accokeek Creek
We Like Nature OK, We Just Don’t Like It to Be Too Messy.
Dishonorable Mentions
The Gaujot Brothers of West Virginia
They must have been hard up for heroes back in the day. How else to explain the Medals of Honor—America’s highest award for valor in combat–given 15 months apart in 1911 and 1912 to the Gaujot brothers of West Virginia, one of whom had once shot and killed an apparently unarmed fellow soldier and got away with it in military court, the other of whom had been court martialed for water-torturing Filipino prisoners and had to pay a whopping $150 fine?
Deliverance
Story Time in Heck
I’d rather have been Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, one of my favorite Old Testament stories, plus I always liked saying their names, but since there was only just the one of me I settled for thinking of myself as a modern-day Daniel in the lions’ den as I strode in a light rain past the free hot chocolate tables and the not-so-free donut trucks and into Riverbend High School in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The lobby had been converted for the day—the first Saturday in December—into what looked like the tail end of a yard sale when all that’s left are a bunch of crappy books laid out on folding tables, plus a couple of bowls filled with rubber balls and pencils.
Off Our Rockers
From Lies, Race, and Redemption: A Memoir
As a white Southern woman born in 1937, I grew up in a segregated society of “White only” and “Colored only” signs, separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate waiting rooms and schools and churches, separate entrances to the town of Smithfield, Virginia’s one movie theater. “Separate but equal” was the mantra, but it was a lie. You had to be blind, insensitive, and in total denial to believe it. Since I was the privileged color, racism hadn’t threatened my life and stripped me of my humanity, but it had sickened my soul.
Being Human
Widowhood
A Confession
All that banging was happening inside my dream; yet it kept going. Insistent. Urgent.
I rolled over and squinted at the clock. 2:20 a.m. Someone was pounding on the front door. Ahhh, my husband forgot his key. He’s home, finally, from the college basketball game he’d flown down to Wake Forest to see. In darkness, I lurched down the hallway to let him in.
On my porch stood a young Fredericksburg cop. His cruiser was in the driveway, blue lights swirling in the night. I tugged my T-shirt down as far as it would go over my bare legs and wondered if I was in some kind of trouble.
Burying Teeny Tiny
A Better Place
My first scientific experiment was to find out if heaven existed. Of course it wasn’t real science. I didn’t know anything about the experimental method, but I knew there was something I had to find out. By the time I was 6, I had heard a lot about heaven from my devoutly religious father and from preachers who conducted funerals. You have to understand that when I was growing up in the farming community of Smithfield, Virginia, back in the 1940s, funerals and weddings were the two biggest social events, and my family didn’t miss a one. Funerals and weddings were like family reunions with people you hadn’t seen since the last event and one person you’d never see again.
At Long Last Love
A man doesn’t wait for you to take care of your dying ex-husband if he doesn’t love you.
A Memory of Light
Salt to the Sea
[Editor’s note: Ceili Leahy was 17 in the fall of 2014 when she started at the University of Virginia, three months after completing chemotherapy for metastatic Ewings sarcoma. She took a course in American Environmental Literature that first semester, and in November 2014 was assigned to write an essay in the style of one of the authors. Ceili—an Irish name, pronounced Kay-Lee–chose Annie Dillard because she so loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “By using [Annie Dillard’s] technique of posing rhetorical questions and incorporating language that is more colloquial than literary, I created a similar voice,” Ceili wrote in a note accompanying the assignment. “My exploration of the human memory builds off Dillard’s treatment of consciousness and self-consciousness and their pertinence to the ‘great door to the present.’” On January 27, 2016, a year and a half after writing this essay, Ceili, then 19, died from acute myeloid leukemia at Children’s National Hospital. She had stopped treatment a few months earlier so that she could “live vividly” through her last days.]
Prescriptions
Not Healthy. Not Caring. Not Even a System.
Broken Bad
A few months after he graduated from college, a friend crashed his bike one evening as he raced down a trail near Charlottesville. He suffered a life-altering spinal cord injury, but as those injuries go, he was fairly lucky: He retained full use of his upper body and partial use of his legs, and despite fears that he’d never ride again, he went on to become an Olympic para-cyclist. He was also fortunate in another way: Before his accident, his dad had bought him a short-term health insurance policy.
Papa Don’t Preach
Put Away That Cell Phone or Ernest Hemingway Will Punch You in the Face
How to Hospital
There’s No Point in Depriving Yourself When Things Already Suck
LOL
A Modest Proposal
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations (With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Top 10 Reasons Why Home is Better than the Pound
As dictated by J.D. (aka Jus’a Dawg) Evans
Kiss “A as in Apple” Goodbye
The All New & Completely Updated Guide to Code Words for the International Spelling Alphabet
A Modest Proposal
(With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations
22401-ish
NO MOSS?
For Hospital Corporation,
Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’
Comes to an End After 20 Years
(They’re Keeping the Building, Too)
No Moss?
For Hospital Corporation, Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’ Comes to an End After 20 Years
The Far-Right Spammers of Falmouth Bottom
Meet the Neighbors
The Right-Wing Spammers and Scriveners show up for work in the mornings just like anybody else, pulling off Washington Street in the tiny village of Falmouth, Virginia, squeezing through a narrow opening in a chain link fence, and parking in a gravel lot under a row of ivy-strangled oaks, three of them dying, one already dead. They drive a Toyota Prius with a turtle sticker on the back. Or a black SUV, or an older-model Camry, or any of a dozen other middle-class sedans. Nothing flashy, though one of their bosses, a bearded, balding, political marketer and Shriner potentate named Andrew Coelho keeps a Heritage Shrine Club trailer back there for ferrying around his lodge’s clown cars.
The Beavers of Accokeek Creek
We Like Nature OK, We Just Don’t Like It to Be Too Messy.
Deliverance
Story Time in Heck
I’d rather have been Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, one of my favorite Old Testament stories, plus I always liked saying their names, but since there was only just the one of me I settled for thinking of myself as a modern-day Daniel in the lions’ den as I strode in a light rain past the free hot chocolate tables and the not-so-free donut trucks and into Riverbend High School in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The lobby had been converted for the day—the first Saturday in December—into what looked like the tail end of a yard sale when all that’s left are a bunch of crappy books laid out on folding tables, plus a couple of bowls filled with rubber balls and pencils.
A Modest Proposal
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations (With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
It Could Have Happened Here
G.O.D. and Country
Brent David Alford was watching hockey the night of June 18, 2022. Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals, Colorado Avalanche vs. Tampa Bay Lightning. The Avs were in the process of smoking the Lightning, 7-0, and would go on to win the Cup 4-2. At 9:45 p.m., late in the second period or early in the third, Alford’s wife Anjelica noticed a car had pulled into their long private drive in rural Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and was idling about 30 yards from the house at a dirt turnaround. Alford grabbed his handgun, a Glock 9mm with a 15-round magazine, and went out to confront the driver and whoever else was in the car. Anjelica and a teenage son, their youngest, stayed at the front door. Anjelica would later tell an investigator that there was so much marijuana smoke filling the car that the occupants’ heads bobbed above it as if they were floating on a cloud–an image she insisted she saw despite the distance from the house, the darkness, the floodlight she said was reflecting off the car windows, and the law of thermodynamics.
Etcetera
About Pie & Chai
Steve and Janet Watkins started Pie & Chai Magazine in November 2022. Our intention is to publish 12 times a year, with a new issue coming out the first of every month. We’ll see how that goes. Steve is the editor. Here’s what Janet wrote (and Steve edited) for the first issue under the headline “Why Pie & Chai” which pretty much explains it all:
We’re launching Pie & Chai Magazine for a simple reason: to provide good writers with a place to tell good stories, the kind worth sharing. In these stories—under the broad categories of Deep Dives, Being Human, Prescriptions, LOL, Etcetera, and 22401(ish)—we hope to move, enlighten, and amuse you, and draw you in to a creative community.
We aren’t here to make money. We won’t sell subscriptions, we won’t run ads, we won’t pirate your data, and our contributors won’t get paid. Everything here will exist because someone cared enough to create it. For free.
We’re old-school print journalists, so we believe in facts (not alternative ones) and the power of stories to comfort and afflict. We’ll serve up deep reporting, thoughtful analysis, personal essays and poignant humor. You won’t find press releases here, or fiction. No poetry, either, except as it may offer itself up in some of the prose. What you will find is humanity in all its glorious messiness.
In our dreams, Pie & Chai has been a physical place for dishing up warm desserts and bringing people together. But we don’t own a building, and we’d rather write than cook. So, this is our virtual effort to expand minds, forge connections, and sweeten lives.
Pull up a seat.
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