“The only information I can give you about the episode,” said the rep, “is that its title is ‘My Dirty Little Secret’.” Helen stood paralyzed in her kitchen as the phone call’s initial excitement swerved into a loop de loop… Continue Reading
I let the children play with the lions because I decided that it was part of their education to examine life from another planet. This was after I ordered a box of domestic cats but many of my students, the… Continue Reading
Paris is a city of many things — lights, sounds, whispers… and cats. Cats haunt modern Paris like fur-clad ghosts — whiskered faces through window panes, gray mousers plying their trade in alleyways, rooftop cats and cats who sleep and… Continue Reading
Three young men were sitting a few seats away from me at the counter, sun-browned and neatly scrubbed in civvies. Newly assigned at the Coast Guard station out on the point. They weren’t difficult to spot. I could pick up… Continue Reading
Lunchtime sucked when your best friend was at home sick. Sure, I could hang out with those I labeled ‘school friends,’ but then I’d be the kid who didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the group. As a… Continue Reading
She’s just a touch tinier than the rest of the cheerleaders, so Viv is the one who gets thrown into the air. She likes feeling like she’s flying. She feels special up there. Maybe even magical. When she goes upwards,… Continue Reading
Mom always told me my blackberry pie tasted like hers. We’d both be bent at the waist, shoulders hunched, sturdily pushing rolling pins through flour-coated dough in the tiny kitchen. Heat would pool at the back of my neck and… Continue Reading
“I want to be a witch,” said the girl. She was a young thing, plump and pale as milk, with watery eyes that barely qualified as blue. As ordinary-looking as it was possible for a child to be without turning… Continue Reading
He was disconnected, cut adrift, left alone, lost, all of this happening so quickly he was not even frightened at first. He heard the motors spooling up, rising to a shriek, and arcs of electricity erupted from the machine behind… Continue Reading
When Father died, Mama and I inherited a crumbling castle in a distant forest, and nothing else. But thither we went — the rest of Father’s fortune went to a male relation, who turned us out of our town house… Continue Reading