You carry his phone in your pocket. Its weight, the closest you have now to holding his hand. Taking it out, you glance through his pictures, read his texts. The phone is still alive. To shut it down would be… Continue Reading
The thing you need to understand is none of us liked him from the start. That’s why we weren’t too choked when we first heard about the breakup. It’s not that we didn’t care about my sister. Really, we were… Continue Reading
My sister always amazed me with her lack of interest in everything. She had asthma as a kid. Every winter, as I dragged myself out of bed to attend school, she would be allowed to sleep in late. She was… Continue Reading
The day my brother, Murdoch, stopped talking he looked down a well and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. The well was on Old Man Mitchell’s property south of town where junk covered the front lawns. Murdoch heard about… Continue Reading
I work a mixture of peat and shredded leaves into the hole, then arrange the bulbs pointy end up before blanketing them with a few inches of dirt. Planting crocuses is supposed to keep me from offing myself in the… Continue Reading
There’s this ball, pink-seamed and spinning fast, its coordinates locked on the northern perimeter of my left eye socket. All the proof I need that God hates me. No surprise, as my earthly father was never that fond of me… Continue Reading
I “We get in, get the tree, get out,” says Dad. “Got it?”Football begins in less than two hours; my family is on the clock. II Marc points out that Christmas trees do not grow in Bethlehem. It would be… Continue Reading
In her English class, Gillian was assigned an ode. She wrote to the jagged Zorro scar above her knee from the August night she taught Benny to surf in the rickety trailer camper their father towed. They’d been banished from… 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
We march forward, just the three of us, winding through the endless maze of the toxic jungle. My brother’s boots squelch in the sucking mud, pools of dark liquid earth cast with a purple, oily sheen. Unnatural, and yet completely… Continue Reading