Self Defense
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Blue House
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Murder Down On the River
Essay | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
This was a quiet moment that I sketched nearly a half-century ago, in a country courthouse, at a murder trial.
I was once a courtroom sketch artist, one of the many hats I wore during my days at The Banner, a small-town newspaper that our family owned in Brownstown, Indiana, for decades.
The courts banned photography. You wouldn’t want the lawyers playing to the cameras, the thinking goes.
So there I was, in the front row center, with my sketchbook, pencils and chalks. The sketches had to be fast. A fleeting instant, a facial expression, might come and go in no time at all.
The Eyes, the Sky, the Nakedness
Essay | Jesse Pesta
One day a few years ago, around the time when Covid started hitting the city hard, I went for a walk and saw a doll in the back window of a parked car.
The eyes, the sky, the nakedness. The little toy seemed so defenseless and adrift, and weren’t we all? I could relate to that, so I snapped a photo.
It was the start of a brief time I’d call walking to stay sane.
New York City’s fever dream of empty avenues and all-night ambulance sirens was suddenly a new normal. The change happened so fast, was it even real? Can I believe my lying eyes?
Meadow Path
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
‘Waiting for That Cut’
Essay | Jesse Pesta
Dhanbahadur Shresta is a country doctor in a remote village in Nepal. He had just pulled someone’s tooth and was reassuring his patient that the pain wouldn’t last too long when the earthquake struck.
His stone building collapsed, burying patient and doctor alive. Pinned beneath rubble, Mr. Shresta said, he decided: “Death was certain.”
Reading Material
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Boredom
Photo | Jesse Pesta
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Condensed Life Histories
Comic | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Moving Day
Short Story | Abigail and Jesse Pesta
In the kitchen, Dad’s sitting on the linoleum floor, cussing at a vacuum cleaner. The piece that’s supposed to connect the top to the bottom doesn’t quite fit. It’s August and the apartment is boiling hot.
Sweat’s running down the back of his neck like a fountain drink at Taco Bell. Dad looks at a pigeon on the windowsill. The window is open. The bird is watching him with a creepy pink eye.
“God, give me a break,” Dad says for the sixth time. “Just one break.”
He’s so mad at the vacuum cleaner, he’s hissing his words. “Jussst one sssingle break. Is that so much to ask, God?” he asks. The pigeon blinks.
Daydream
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Blue T
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Is Your Signal Clear?
Photo | Jesse Pesta
The Mystery of the Hat
Short Story | Abigail Pesta
I met Emma at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Houston, and we sat for a few minutes on a bench outside the deserted basketball court. It felt like the coldest day of the year. The black city sludge at the curb was frozen rock solid. Overhead a bitter wind whipped the branches of a tree, hopelessly tangled with plastic bags.
But none of this mattered to Emma, because she was in love and wanted to spend the afternoon telling me about it.
She looked radiant and pixie-like, wearing a striped knit cap with a fuzzy ball swinging on the end of a piece of yarn. “I am so in love!” she said.
Oh please. Hearing those words, I drew the obvious conclusion. The relationship is already doomed.
Street Sweeper, Udaipur
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Driver
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Wait
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
For this painting I used as a reference a photograph from an old family album. The girl in the photo was me.
As I looked at the old photo, time collapsed for a millisecond. The little-girl self was looking into the future. She could see me, now. I had that feeling. And the present-day me was carried back to that birthday party.
Waiting for the guests to arrive, a pensive moment. Would they all come for sure? Window blinds shielding me from the hot August sun.
Something Made Me Stop
Short Story | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
“Hi, Margaret. Laurie Stanton Carter added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Laurie in order for you to be friends on Facebook. Thanks, the Facebook Team.”
Laurie? Laurie of 60 years ago?
Once upon a time you met, played Wild West cowboys in your backyards, and went your separate ways.
Today that little girl gallops out of the past, all grown up and scaring you again.
* * *
We lived next door as kids, in brand new homes with the lingering fragrance of pine boards. All sorts of construction materials — planks, scraps of lumber, empty plaster bags — lay piled at the edges of our treeless, crabgrass yards.
August Morning
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Lean
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Travel Diary of Foods
Comic | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Nightmare Lamb
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Prince’s Terrace
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Chapter 1: ‘A Woman In a Cast’
A Note From Maureen, Abigail and Jesse
Here’s the first chapter of “Safely Buried,” a novel originally published right here on this site by John “Dad” Pesta in 2006. There’s a story behind that.
John had decided to write a mystery, one chapter a week, and publish it as he wrote it. He figured the deadlines would force him to get the thing done.
It worked. He wrote 37 chapters. That’s 37 weeks of cliffhangers.
What happened next was that “Safely Buried” was not adapted into a movie starring Adam Driver.
But in the life of John Pesta, this book was a true Hollywood success story. He sold nearly 10,000 copies, wrote a sequel, wrote another novel and signed a three-book deal with a publisher.
Here comes the cliffhanger …
Pets We’ve Known
Comic | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
An Evening In Shanghai
Short Story | Abigail Pesta
The night we got to Shanghai, Marcy and I were so tired that all we did was stay in the hotel and watch “The Sound of Music” on TV.
Never mind that it was dubbed in Chinese which neither of us spoke.
So the next day, we promised ourselves, we’d have an adventure. Which is how, 24 hours later, we found ourselves standing next to a creepy hearse-like limo at midnight, trying to decide how stupid we’d be if we actually climbed in.
I mean, lace curtains?
Napoleon, in a leather jacket, leather hat and Mao collar, did look like someone trying to play the role of a mob kingpin, albeit a short mob kingpin. I could take him in a fight. Question: Did I want to?
Sure I wanted adventure, but this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I’d imagined an weekend of strolling through street markets and eating delicious snacks. Club-hopping with tough guys six inches shorter than me? Not in the plan.
The limo was piloted by a pair of twentysomething barflies we’d chatted up. Now they were inviting us out for a night on the town. Their names, Jimmy and Napoleon.
“Hop in,” Napoleon said. “We’re going to a nightclub with movie stars.”
Hmm, sounded suspicious. For starters, yeah this was back in the 1990s, but who says “nightclubs”? And what 25-year-olds drive around Shanghai, or anyplace really, in limos that look like this?
City Girl
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Boy’s Memory
Charcoal | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Air Travel Anxieties
Comic | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Wedding Parade
Pastel | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
This is from a photo and a memory. At dusk in the city of Udaipur in India I had stumbled upon a wedding parade of carts and a camel-drawn wagon heaped with speakers blaring music.
At the back of the procession were a dozen or so kids, each carrying basically a chandelier. The lights were wired to a generator on another cart that was so old-fashioned, it would fit right in at the county fair if someone slipped it into a display of engines from the 1920s.
A huge flywheel spun lazily. A few of the girls struck Bollywood poses with their lights as we passed. The camel had seen it all before. Eventually the whole thing meandered down a narrow lane.
The Kitchen Arts
Short Story | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Okay, so this is where we’re headed today, Nan said to herself earlier, after the mailbox blew up. Evidently a firecracker delivery had happened after the mail delivery.
One of the rural facts of life is that kids like to blow up your mailbox with cherry bombs sometimes. Fair enough.
But why today?
She already had to deal with Melanie, who was slumped on a stool at the kitchen counter, her cheeks streaked with tears because she had witnessed a snapping turtle devour a painted turtle down at the pond.
Melanie was dabbing her eyes, and the kitchen was already like a sauna because Nan was boiling huge pots of water in preparation for the mashed potato project.
Negotiating With a Cat
Comic | Maureen O’Hara Pesta
Tourist
Photo | Jesse Pesta
Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of the page or else the beginning, depending how you think about it.
Back around 2004, the first thing we put on this site was “You Need to Have a Plan,” the short story above. Years later I (Jesse here) retroactively added this photo as the first post to try to create the impression that we had kicked things off with something more thematic and intentional than not having a plan.
It’s a picture of a tourist. Or is it all of us, looking out at a great big crazy world? For now let’s go with that.