Nonfiction | May 07, 2016
The Polish Prince
John W. Evans
During Prohibition, Granny Wiskowski sold bootleg gin out of her living room and, at the end of her life, she was still a skilled gambler. The night she won a gold-and-turquoise Miami Dolphins pendant at hospital bingo, she took down the box from her bed stand, held it out to me and poked a figure into my sternum. “Don’t take no shit from no one,” she said in her hoarse half-Polish, half-English whisper. I had never heard an adult swear except in anger, and now I wasn’t even in trouble. I hooked the clasp around my neck and wore the pendant for most of the decade, right through the tarnish. A necklace. My new favorite team.
This essay is not currently available online.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT
Nonfiction
May 17 2022
Facing It
Facing it Sally Crossley “there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” —T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock … read more
Nonfiction
May 16 2022
Oranges
Oranges Robin Reif We called it the Buffet of Dead Food: flaccid bacon, eggs—hard-boiled and cold—and toast so tough it scratched the roofs of our mouths. Still, the meal had… read more
Nonfiction
Jan 07 2022
Cover Up
Cover Up I did not begin my time in Jerusalem with the desire to be dangerous. I arrived in that most intoxicating, infuriating, enervating, derelict, and sad of cities with… read more