The screen door banged shut behind them and the terrible scene came into focus. Bits of brown paper soggy with saliva fly-speckling the carpet. Their fat spaniel Leo lounging in the middle of it, staring up at them, his expression… Continue Reading
Dahlia and her twin kindergarteners sat on their front porch and watched the arborists. A man scaled their ash’s thick trunk like a tree frog, the boys cheering as each yank of the climbing rope propelled him higher. When he… Continue Reading
No one mentions the noise. Survivors, they talk about the brutal heat, the desperate panic, the need for escape. All true. Two A.M. and Beth and I hardly had time to grab Emma, three years old and groggy with sleep,… Continue Reading
The mist often hung low across the camp and brought with it an ethereal fug. There was a surreal quality to looking out across the fields at lunchtime, the faint popping noise of the ranges in the distance, blurred by… Continue Reading
Desi Stewart and her fellow strikers didn’t know who owned the butterscotch labradoodle. Each day, the big, sweet dog loped out of the trees across the street from the picket line in front of the high school and bounded over… Continue Reading
I had promised myself all afternoon that I would not go. The hours moved through my tiny apartment off Bardstown Road like pale water slipping over stones — six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight. The June light lingered insistently at the… Continue Reading
Professor (a self-bestowed honour) Von Fountain de Marc, Prof VFM for those short of time, took a bold step many visionaries had in the past, and pointed his invention at himself, then pushed the undramatic button. Instantly the display updated:… Continue Reading
There’s a side of his face that’s prettier than the other. No part of him is dull or ugly, but one side is more vibrant. It’s his right side.Don’t get me wrong — a world in which only his left… Continue Reading
The air in Kyoto was supposed to be a baptism. Each breath, thick with the scent of damp moss and laced with distant incense, was meant to wash away the memory of her father’s silence, a silence louder than any… Continue Reading
It’s 1984, and there’s a feature story about the Holocaust in the magazine section of the Sunday newspaper. At age nine, I have an adult vocabulary and an insatiable appetite for reading material. I devour the story without knowing what… Continue Reading