“You didn’t have to come with me, Sam. I’m okay.” Sam handed me the challah I’d made the day before, wrapped in a cloth. He’d always scared me a little bit, tall and athletic and proud. He looked like the… Continue Reading
I was eleven years old when I learned that penguins, in fact, are incapable of flight. It may seem like a mundane — even embarrassing — revelation, but to me, it changed the course of my life. Five years prior… Continue Reading
The flowers glow against the pewter light of a soggy spring. You regard them with distaste. Your feet smack against the pavement, thud, thud, thud, aggravation weighting your steps. You do not want to go. You do not want to… Continue Reading
The little boy was alone, playing Cowboys-and-Indians outside, when the deputies came. He was six years old. He was pretending to be a cowboy, an outlaw, taking life and land from the Indians, from the innocent. The white jeep came… Continue Reading
The problem with friendships was the invisible boundary lines and the unscripted definitions that everyone seemed to understand. Everyone except Thelma, who found them mystifying. It hadn’t always been so complicated. On her first day at school, Jenny Smith sat… Continue Reading
The smell of death isn’t death; it’s food. The smell wafts from the kitchen, permeates the hallway, living room, and dining room of the old colonial. It travels up the stairs in whiffs of almost tangible threads into the two… Continue Reading
The school bus can fit about eighty students, give or take, but there are only twenty-six that live on my route. That’s the only reason I agreed to get on this horrific hell-machine in the first place; the number twenty-six… Continue Reading
Tea tasted sweet or bitter depending on her mood, though she always made it the same way every evening. It was bitter on this day of mourning. The teaspoon clicked against fine white china decorated in blue ink. The pattern… Continue Reading
“The realtor says your house will be listed tomorrow.” Mom ignores me. We both sit, enthralled by the blank TV screen, in the living room of her apartment. She moved to the independent-living section of this old-folks village six months… Continue Reading
Trust me, you don’t rent an apartment over an Indian Restaurant because you love Indian food. You do it because of a lack of available rentals and to escape the dorms with their alcohol-drenched theme parties and communal bathrooms. Naitee… Continue Reading