The Book in the Box
Getting trashed was my way of announcing who I was: not Mormon.
When I left for college in 1984, I packed some things in a banana box I brought home from Safeway. The box was sturdy, with useful handles cut in the sides, and large, less useful holes at the top and bottom.
Shawn Vestal's novel, Daredevils, was published in April by Penguin Press. His collection of short stories, Godforsaken Idaho, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction in 2014. A graduate of the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, he lives with his wife and son in Spokane, Washington, where he is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review.
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More in this series
The One About the Orthodox Jewish Woman and the Rabbi’s Wife
“I saw that God I’d been so determined to believe in not as an absolute, but as a construct that couldn’t take a joke.”
The Nonbeliever
“The Lord either saw me unfit to visit—or it was that other thing, that lightless tunnel, that labyrinth turned endless maze.”
Finding Salvation in Death Cab for Cutie
I needed her to tell me that it was okay to doubt, to yearn, for the lyrics in our headphones to mean something sacred—with or without God.