Jennifer Vasallo
Bio
Educator by day, writer by night. Millennial. Lover of literature, films, taking pictures, surrealist art, cafecito, cultura, travel, making memories, and my familia. Join me on this wild ride we call life from my perspective🖖🏼
Stories (13)
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What The Room Keeps
The beginning was so small that I almost missed it. After the bell rings, my classroom usually empties slowly, much in the way bars do at last call when everyone lingers a little longer than they should. It never fails—someone lingers to spill the day’s hottest tea, someone else gathers the Chromebooks and slides them into the cart while pretending not to listen, and at least one kid asks to borrow my pink, English teacher coded cardigan tomorrow because the air conditioning in this building seems personally offended by human comfort. I call them “my child”, when they say something so obvious or ridiculous, threaten to throw someone out the window in a voice that makes the good students laugh as I gather my patience together and ask them to start collecting bail money because “today is finally the day”. Eventually the hallway wins and carries them off, but the room never quite lets them go. The blue LED lights that line the ceiling are still glowing. The gold frames across the back wall—Bad Bunny, Tupac Shakur, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Sarah J. Maas, George Lucas, & Kubrick—my silent proof that language belongs to everyone.
By Jennifer Vasallo 4 days ago in Fiction
The Imagined Life of Ana Luzia Morales. Winner in You Were Never Really Here Challenge.
Ana Luzia Morales woke up in her Manhattan apartment to find that the sun had forgotten how to rise. It hung instead in the corner of the sky like a child’s crayon scribble smeared behind the oppressive grey clouds. The city outside her bedroom window moved like a memory on fast forward—vivid, restless, and somewhat out of synch.
By Jennifer Vasallo 8 months ago in Fiction
Where Strength Meets Courage
There are moments throughout our existence that splits lives in two: before and after. I was seventeen when that line in the sand was drawn for me. My grandmother—my one true grandparent—had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. I remember watching her body shrinking into the bedsheets, folding into itself like soggy paper left out in the rain. Her once lively spirit withering away to bed-ridden dust. Sure, the cigarettes were gone, but so was she—slowly, painfully, piece by piece. Traumatizing to say the least.
By Jennifer Vasallo 11 months ago in Psyche
Schitt’s Creek: Where Eccentricity Blooms
Schitt's Creek: a riches-to-rags tale that is hilariously absurd. From “Ew, David's” antics, “A little bit” Alexis’ escapades, Moira’s feuding wigs, and Johnny’s wacky unsolicited advise, the Roses find their way in a town where eccentricity is the currency. Soak it all in as the Roses bloom in unexpected soil.
By Jennifer Vasallo 3 years ago in Critique
Boxed In
In a charming suburban neighborhood in New Orleans, the Davis family members were packing up their final boxes and getting ready for the big cross-country move. Sam, a marketing representative, was recently hired as a marketing executive for a company that was based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Although Sam was hired almost three months ago, he and his wife Kate waited until summer break so that they wouldn’t uproot Georgia and Jinny from their lives in the middle of the school year. Georgia, the eldest of the two sisters, was friendly, but incredibly shy. Sam and Kate were worried that if they moved the girls cross-country in the middle of the school year, Georgia would probably have a tough time readjusting to the sudden change. After all, freshman year is notoriously known for being the toughest year and Sam and Kate feared that an unwelcomed change on their growing teen’s life would lead to depression and anxiety. Jinny, on the other hand, was still in elementary school and would probably not remember a single detail from the whole ordeal, but out of respect for Georgia, the couple chose to make a long-distance marriage work until school was over. As they were packing, Sam and Kate were reminiscing on all of the memories they had made together in that house. The couple has lived in New Orleans their entire lives, so packing their family’s four door sedan to its gills, locking their doors, and putting up the ‘sold’ sign on the hanging billboard at the edge of their property was a bittersweet moment for each of them respectively.
By Jennifer Vasallo 5 years ago in Horror
Little By Little, Step By Step
It is without a doubt that teaching during the pandemic was one, if not the most, difficult parts of my career. Now, I am not a seasoned veteran who has 10 plus years of experience under her belt or anything, nor am I someone who has experienced some of the harshest challenges that other educators have, but here I am entering year five and going through a career crisis—one that I did not even intend to have because even though I am often burned out by my career, I thought teaching was my life’s passion.
By Jennifer Vasallo 5 years ago in Education
