Two years after her mother’s death, Jane’s boyfriend asked her to marry him, and nine months later, they moved across the country to start their new life. Jane was twenty-nine, ready to step away from Phoenix after a hard few years. Ryan...
When reporting on suicide, the CDC advises against including the suicide method or overly positive descriptions of the deceased for fear of causing contagion.
Which gave Reporter Jane a problem in reporting on how her dad did what he did...
Alice spots the fat women through the second-story kitchen window. It’s Wednesday, so Dad is out at his feelings meeting. She has just turned eight and has been dragging her drumsticks over different household surfaces to see what sounds...
When this story ended—or when it began, because who on June Plum Road could tell the difference?—the mermaids were floating at the top of Old Henry’s tank. The green hair of one and the pink hair of the other fanned out on the water’s...
We wake up in the badlands when the sun begins to rise. It was a mistake to keep walking in the dark last night. Every pathway the same, we could have walked in a hundred circles. We put our hands on the ravine walls and used the planets...
This is going to be—no, I don’t want to be categorical—this could be the start of a virtuous circle. My psychologist has told me that I need to say positive things to myself, only I don’t want to be too positive, as that might just make...
It’s about a half-hour train ride to Yonkers, much of it along the river. You come out of the city, off the island, and countryside appears—green strips of landscape, woody bluffs, brown water, telephone lines.
The ferry, tied still to the dock, pointed north, toward where the Bosporus opened into the Black Sea. The boat wasn’t headed there, but was bound for Istanbul, and it left in fifteen minutes, at three.
