Sally had been marching up and down this steep hill every day since finishing work. Her route started and ended at the holy well. An ancient stone structure with a black caged roof, fronted by a cracked drinking fountain and… Continue Reading
It happened at midnight. I was awake, shivering in the corner of the cave, when the first contraction hit me. I hissed, dropping a hand to the curve of my stomach. It’s just a cramp, I half-begged. Instead of fading,… Continue Reading
The bell rings when a person enters the store, the sound light and musical. Like sunlight, it cuts through the shadows in the open room to the desk at the back. Nils has a small lamp lit on his desk… Continue Reading
My first thought was to lie, and spent a few moments dreaming up common household emergencies like an overflowing washing machine or a broken refrigerator. But Marla was one of those sympathetic-but-also-kind-of-nosy bosses and usually would look the other way… Continue Reading
Every day my head nurse, Mindy, was mean to me. She always gave me the hardest assignments — the patient who yelled “help me” constantly, or the one with explosive diarrhea. Every night, I cried myself to sleep as my… Continue Reading
Hania grew up in a southwest Detroit neighborhood where most people understood English well enough to follow radio broadcasts of Joe Louis fights and fireside chats. But they were far more comfortable conversing in Polish. It was the language of… Continue Reading
Epiphany: I need lemons. A tumble of lemons, a volcano of fresh explosive citrus, the obese mamas with that extraterrestrial shine, not those dinky rough-hide goblins lurking at the bottom of produce boxes. Fifty will do, I think. No, seventy;… Continue Reading
My daughter’s red hair lights up the room, this wild child, this toddler Pippi Longstocking. Her father had red hair. I met him in a mad, bad, crazy time in my life when I broke up with Tim, my eight-year-long… Continue Reading
Alkina opens wide one eye against the cold steel of her late husband’s telescope and remembers on a clear night, less than three months ago, Mare Fecunditatis, appearing so close she would have sworn water lay there. That morning he’d… Continue Reading
Pipes banged and hissed as I heard the last of my heat fading away. The wood furnace was losing pressure fast and I knew soon there would not be enough water in the pipes to circulate heat, plunging the house… Continue Reading