The belly of a clown is filled with cotton candy and cola and colored flags. That’s what my cousin told me when we found the big dead clown. Clowns weren’t people. They were creatures, symbols, agents. We found one, belly up, floating in a stagnant pond near a culvert. Mountain Dew bottles and cigarette butts […]
House does not want you here. Does not want your laughter in its halls. Does not want your gentle breathing at night. Your cheerful demeanor. Your smiling brood. It does not want your hopeful words to echo off its walls. Your quiet murmurs. Your awkward silence. Your profanities, inanities, the slickness of your sex. Your […]
My mother was the first one to tell me about the river. When we arrived in this town, she went to a bookstore and bought herself a little book about the place’s history—as we were so strangers to Southern culture, and the way my mother tried to make herself acquainted to something was through books. […]
Your mother teaches you the rituals of bathing. First with a rubber duckie, then with Mr. Bubble, then with rose-scented crystals that come packaged with a satin bow on top. No one was ever allowed to bathe you but her. She didn’t trust anyone to follow the rites. These are the secrets that must be […]
In the small hours, Greg likes to put the machines on. When there’s no one using whichever of the Scrub Club branches he happens to be visiting, he sticks all the washers on for a spin, all the driers on a fast tumble. Their downtime health check, he calls it. You can tell a lot […]
It is fair to say that Hedley Hill was no stranger to death. Death had furnished him with the funds to establish his business in that long cold winter of 1863 when the old world was choking on the new, with locomotives rumbling under Paddington and disease tearing through the city from East End to […]
There are eight of them, walking one behind the other down the cliff path, ordered smallest to tallest. Adam, the oldest, is nine. Corinne, the youngest, is six and tougher than any of them. She leads the way, she carries the stick, she takes two steps to everyone else’s one. Adam, at the back, carries […]
I stopped eating on a Sunday. It felt right. That most holy of days; the purging of fleshly desire laid bare on an altar of my own making. If there was any God lingering in the holy dust I carried in my lungs, I could taste nothing other than the emptiness I would craft for […]
He remembered little of his father. He wondered if this lack of information was deliberate, and mutual. Sometimes a memory would surface and he’d be seduced into obsessive examination until he managed to bury it again. Gavin was due to take possession of his father’s estate in early November, but New England had a devastating […]
My brother on my front porch wailing my name, soaking wet and without a jacket in the cold spring rain, with nowhere else in the world to go, wondering why I won’t let him in. My brother crashing at our mom’s house, preying on her weakness the way he always did; me calling her every […]
