Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialst, and Master Photographer.
Out of nowhere, my former niece—who, for all intents and purposes, has become my unofficially adopted daughter—reached out and asked if I could pick her up. The timing was uncanny. She called while I was out with Amelia, and the moment I learned she needed a ride as soon as possible, I wasted no time.…
The sky was a canvas of pastel hues, as the sun descended in a final blaze of glory. The moon, a luminescent orb, rose slowly into the night, casting a mystical glow upon the earth. As the stars twinkled in the inky blackness, the moon and the sun shared a timeless embrace, a dance of…
I was twenty-three when they sent me home. Three summers of devotion, three years of sunburns and scraped knees, of singing around the fire and waking up before dawn to make sure my campers were safe, fed, and cared for. I had built my world around the summer camp where I spent every summer since…
The world never roots for the stegosaurus. It doesn’t have the sleek, predatory prowess of the Velociraptor, the sheer brute force of the Tyrannosaurus rex, or even the rebellious charm of the Triceratops. If the dinosaur kingdom were a high school, the T. rex would be the star quarterback, the raptors would be the overachieving…
I drove like hell through the night, the highway stretching endlessly before me, my headlights cutting through the darkness like a blade. The only sound was the hum of the tires on the asphalt and the music playing on my cell phone. I didn’t stop, didn’t slow down. I just kept driving, pushing forward even…
Some moments in life feel like they belong in a dream—sharp, surreal, drenched in the kind of reckless abandon that only makes sense in retrospect. It started with a dare, a playful nudge from my girlfriend as we walked past an unfamiliar house in Upstate New York. The place was immaculate, almost unnervingly pristine, the…
When I think of the places I used to know, the locations where keyframe events in my life took place, I feel desideratum. Almost as if there is a feeling of loss, or grief for something lost, as if in that moment I was part of something I cannot see. Forever lost, though completely intangible…
The wreckage of my past is the war that’s never won. Often times I think about all the things that were said to me so many years ago; I would always listen to the negativity, silently as if I were laying down in the wake of someone else’s incompetence or insecurities, my elders and a…
Emily Pratt Slatin
P.O. Box 1231
Middletown Springs, VT 05757-1231
United States Of America