Mona’s writing appeared in:
Featured writing
Out of the Cold
The baby hummingbird drank greedily from the dropper. She had named him Finn. Mona let out a pained sigh of relief. It was 3:37 a.m., exactly four hours and twenty-three minutes before her graduate committee would arrive. This Ph.D. defense was her last exam. She would have to demonstrate how torpor worked—the state somewhere in between a power nap and hibernation that hummingbirds went in and out of to withstand cold temperatures.
Shameful Friendships
“‘You need to cover your arms – you're way too skinny,’ my best friend said over dinner. I shoveled more peanut sauce over my meal, just so she wouldn't think I was trying to be thin on purpose.”
A Wild Frontier Intact
The howling grew distant.
Elizabeth had only narrowly escaped. An abandoned rail handcar had saved her from a wolf chasing her through the land of nothing, the land of desert, of the Western frontier.
She gasped, hoping, holding on to the rattling car for life. Somehow she’d known how to release the brakes, and the steep downhill tracks meant that she didn't need another person across from her to pump the handcar like a seesaw.
Forgetting
My grandmother’s decline started long before the beginning of the end.
It started long before she began repeating the same questions over and over, in thirty-second intervals. A long time before she tried to leave the house at night to go find her long-deceased mother in town. It started long before she thought she’d make coffee for the guests of her childhood boarding house that had been torn down some 50 years earlier.
And then it ended. It ended with me seeing death for the first time.
Motherless
When you think of sexual abuse, what do you see? Mostly, people see a male perpetrator.
My abuser was female. Worse, my abuser was my mother.
It made me not want to become a woman. That kind of torment my mother lived? It scared me more than pain would know.
Froid
Mona Angéline’s writing was published in Rebelle Society in 2015 along with her visual art. She didn’t consider herself a writer at that point in time and has perfected her craft and foreign language ability since then.