This happened about ten years ago. Having only finished middle school, I left my backwater hometown—a place with nothing but farm fields—to look for work and moved to a slightly more developed part of the prefecture. I was busting my ass working for crap wages without a single day off, until one day…
One day, out of nowhere, someone tried to take my life. I was just a below-average, completely unremarkable college student. I’d been living on my own for two years after moving away from my parents, …
This is a true story from about twenty years ago. I'm writing it down now because I've finally come to terms with it. It happened during the summer of my sophomore year in college, when my family's ho…
This is a story from back when I was still living with my granddad, running a dairy farm at my childhood home. Having lost my father early on, I lived in a five-person household with my mother, my you…
Does anyone here know what a vault toilet—or pit latrine—is? Back when I was a kid, they were still fairly common, but now that flush toilets are the norm, younger people might have never even seen on…