The house is different to how it was when she lived here with Norman, and Shirley feels obscurely resentful of that fact. She knows she has no reason to be. Everyone has their different tastes, and it would have been odd if Mike and Bess, whose combined ages, Shirley guesses, must barely equal her own, […]
My prince kills my sisters before they can come to me, their deaths my bride price, the payment for an unwanted humanity. His fishing ships and his harpooners drive them into the rocks and the salt-whetted cliffs, into the maw of the coral. They chase them with nets and explosives purchased at great expense from […]
1. Vera was my only cousin and was a distant one in more than the usual way; genetically, yes, but also geographically, emotionally, and, I now see, in the character of what one might call her spirit or soul. We had never shared any sort of kinship, or truly any acquaintanceship, to speak of. Best […]
“We discussed this, Mark. She’s acting out because she’s trying to radically redefine herself.” Rue knelt down by the upstairs banister and pushed her face between the bars. She used to feel a certain sophisticated glow from being driven across town for grief therapy sessions—it satisfied her to trudge into Dr. McKinley’s office with all […]
1 Whenever Susan Pitt went to the circus a clown died, and she wasn’t entirely sure that it was a coincidence. She mostly thought it was. It had seemed a coincidence when she’d been a little girl, rather less so in her late teens and early twenties. And now she’d turned forty, and the world […]
I am the silent house. Pass me by on the corner: the intersection where the streets of history converge—Spanish saints and Anglo generals, martyred priests and failed rebellions—and you think: I am dying of neglect. Look at the gate, the rusted overwrought fleur-de-lis, the spikes and thorns that bloom. Break the lock. Pass through if […]
I Susan found the first one when she was tidying his room. Chris was at school, and she’d been sprucing up the house before popping off to collect him after the afternoon session. The ground floor was done; the lounge was spick-and-span (as her mother had loved to say) and the kitchen was so clean […]
Caleb had been dead for two weeks when I started pretending to be his ghost. After the funeral, Hudson couldn’t sleep. I lay in my room and listened to my son crying. Quiet tears. A big boy suddenly aware that solid things can snap and break and bleed and end up buried under freezing earth. […]
The water hadn’t been clean since Fergus died. The pond filter had stalled that very week, its rotary apparatus refusing to turn as if in silent protest for Fergus’ passing. Annette had been far too busy arranging the funeral to be concerned with the small matter of a defective motor. And afterward she had to […]
It is strange to think that someone had cut your father open, flayed his muscles and cracked apart the interleaving of his ribs like he was some contentious puzzle that required solving. Did they weigh his heart? His lungs? His liver? The length of his intestines, still sour with the half-digested remnants of last night’s […]
