“Calm down now,” Umbra said as she wiped away Thomas’ tears. “Let’s play a game. It’s a secret though. You mustn’t tell anyone about it.” After that Thomas wanted to play every night, so Umbra would get up from her roll up mattress on the floor beside his bed and move the lamps around to […]
Seated at the edge of the stage, Godfrey untied the knot in the handkerchief that Caroline had embroidered his initials into and filled with tokens of love. The audience watched. The audience waited. There were no tricks hidden within the square of white cotton, yet the audience perched at the edges of their seats as […]
“Meet me by the pinnacle,” Martin said as he spat into his mask and rubbed the lenses. “And save me some beer.” Carlos tossed his empty bottle into the floor of the boat and yawned. “Better whistle. I might be asleep.” “Then you’d better wake up. I’m not swimming all the way back.” Martin fitted […]
He’d paid more attention to the knife, and the face he’d brought forth from the wood, than to his left hand trembling as it gripped the cottonwood branch. The blade went into the side of his thumb smoothly, and if it had been wood he would have immediately realized he’d chosen his materials poorly, because […]
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 […]
