Michelle dried her hands on her apron and took it off, while her brother Eugene remained ensconced in the living room and was probably glancing at his watch every few seconds. His fourteen-year-old son Andre was nearly an hour late.… Continue Reading
I left the pub before closing time — the beer wasn’t agreeable — and cut through the park. It wasn’t a great idea and I wouldn’t have done it if I’d not been drunk. The centre of the park was… Continue Reading
Your mom actually likes her family. I was just thinking about that. It was the first thing I loved about her. I loved how simple it seemed, and how much it made me ache. See, we met at a bar.… Continue Reading
The sound of his chewing made her palms sweat. It echoed in her brain. It filled every empty chair around the table, every empty room in their house. He wanted to make her wait, to intimidate her, to show her… Continue Reading
There’s a dirty brown puddle at the bottom of West Street where the snow has melted and turned to sludge. Not that many years ago she would have dived in with both feet, splashing till her socks and trousers were… Continue Reading
Colleen woke to a fog blooming over the snow. The whiteness, wafting and voluptuous, billowed by her bedroom window — or rather Sarah’s window. Her daughter, back at college for the spring semester, wouldn’t be home anytime soon, and Colleen… Continue Reading
“I’m just saying, it seems fucked up to tell her, she doesn’t even know who he is anymore,” Jenny said. “It’s more fucked up not to tell her,” Susan said. The sisters were continuing the argument they’d been having via… Continue Reading
Ophelia indulged in anger and in grief. Those emotions were sublime and transcended beyond sorrow into morbid delight. It was important to her to enjoy distress. Plant your feet, her girlfriend said, but she never said what to plant them… Continue Reading
If he were to die, it seemed wrong he had to do so on the dirt. But he did. Nolan died on Iraq sand, leg blown off from a landmine. “My leg. My leg’s gone, John,” he said, eyes so… Continue Reading
On my twelfth birthday, a puppy drowned in our pool. On that cicada-buzzing Sunday afternoon, I lay on a half-deflated raft, my fingertips skimming the warm water. Thunderclouds pressed down, trapping stagnant, rotten-fish-smelling air. Pinhole rays of sun burst through… Continue Reading