Cover Photo: photograph of a partial side and corner of an empty wrestling ring in the fading light
Photograph via Shutterstock

The Curious Language of Grief

I don’t think I cried over his death for a long time. I wondered if something was wrong with me. I hadn’t realized that we have to learn how to cry.

This isa column by Gabrielle Bellot about books, the body, memory, and more.

One day, when our teacher was out of the classroom, a boy got up out of his seat and picked up one of the coffee-brown folding chairs that was leaning against the back wall. The chairs were thick, heavy metal. The boy folded it up, held it aloft by its legs like a cricket bat, and began to tiptoe to the front of the classroom, where another boy was standing with his back to the room, chatting with someone. The boy with the chair put a finger to his mouth as people began to gesture and gasp. A moment later, he swung the chair hard into the back of the standing boy, the impact resounding through the room.

Dominica Extreme Wrestling

Resident Evil

check him, de man how gay!

GlowGorgeous Ladies of Wrestling

what de hell wrong with you

Yes, you know my name now

hey, there’s nothing to see here


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Laterget

The Office

feel

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub and the Head Instructor at Catapult. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Cut, Gay Magazine, Tin House, Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, them, and many other places. Her essays have been anthologized in Indelible in the Hippocampus (2019), Can We All Be Feminists? (2018), and elsewhere. She holds both an MFA and PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She lives in Queens.