Mrs. Anwen Bevan, retired administrative assistant to a vice president in the Utica Mutual Insurance Co., devoted a portion of each day to strategizing about her yard. It was rectangular, fifty feet wide and eighty feet long, hemmed in by...
The election is over, but we trudge back to the phone bank with our clipboards and scripts. We can still dial the swing states. North Carolina, Florida, Nevada: Can we count on you? Have a blesséd evening!
Daddy was a slick devil, so he must have thought my sister his succubus; a mud-bone Lilith, her lurid tresses struck shut with igneous flicker when it happened in the black. His cinereous
peepers, glazed over moons which pierced through...
The first time a police officer runs his hand up the secret space between my legs, I’m sixteen. I’ve just walked out of a dance. I’m not drunk. In fact, with one exception, I won’t even have a glass of wine until my midtwenties. I’m not...
In the autumn of Maria’s eighteenth year, the year that her beloved father—amateur coin collector, retired autoworker, lapsed Catholic—died silently of liver cancer three weeks after his diagnosis, and the autumn her favorite dog killed her...
I did this to myself, I know. You are not mine but come as wind clotted with the end of a season. Did you know all a ginkgo’s leaves fall on the same day? Sometimes it’s called maiden hair. For its beauty.
Two tree-limb-switched heretics born of Baptist parents, we reveled in a Ouija. But the only black spirits we conjured were our own shadows which flickered against the wall like a private screening. Both of us church boys sweltered in June...
Although they are now in their forties and no longer live in the same house, Helen and Phoebe are still referred to as “the Campbell sisters.” This makes them feel less like people than a brand.
In January 2005, three-year-old Ronnie Paris III slipped into a coma when he fell asleep on a neighbor’s couch while his parents, Ronnie Paris Jr. and Nysheerah Paris, studied Bible verses with friends from church. The thin and unconscious...
