Sarah Penney
Bio
Writer, graphics designer, and adventure-haver. I focus on slice of life anecdotes, travel pieces, and the occasional deep dives into science, film, books, and anything else that catches my fancy. ME and DC.
Stories (4/0)
Doorknob
Surface smooth, or maybe not, made of metal, or maybe not, it opens to a whole new world or just another room, if it opens at all. It might be locked. It might be not. It might be broken but truly, if it were broken, it wouldn’t be doing its job very well and then what would be the point of it?
By Sarah Penney3 years ago in Lifehack
On The Little House Under the Maples
The typewritten font makes the revelation of an ancestor cursed with chronic diarrhea a deeper surprise than it might have been on its own. It’s a little before midnight when you read it and your laughter bursts out before it can be stopped. This is the first page, and it only took two-hundred words for the narrative of your family history to get to uncontrollable bowel movements that resulted in a discharge from the Union Army. It’s later noted to be lucky, as he’d been promised for Gettysburg.
By Sarah Penney3 years ago in Families
Blood Ties
At five years old, my hands were flayed against sharp stones on a dirt road that was just as much a part of my blood as any family ancestry. Dirt pressed into wounds and snakes of red dripped from broken skin, infecting the ground beneath me so it too looked like it bled. The black dog chasing me skidded to a stop, panting and slicked with sweat. The distant sounds of my aunts and mother were too far away and the dog too close and so tears and black spots crowded my vision until the trees lost their leaves and the sky became earth.
By Sarah Penney3 years ago in Families
