Kelly and I met at Ithaca College. Then we both dropped out and rolled down the hill, living in a limbo where we weren’t quite townies but our friends who had stayed students were a bit suspicious of our strange schedules and sudden access to cash. This was back in the late 90s when you […]

Sin was a summer ghost, born of a death sudden as lightning. They slipped on bare ghost soles down the long corridors of an old inn deep in the forest, drifted and danced in the abandoned heft and dust-limned dim of the inn’s pillared halls. With ghost vision, Sin could see the many lanterns, persimmon […]

There is no one here, no one but me. Out of ninety apartments—ten in each of the nine floors—only mine has someone inside, but most have already been sold. It’s an investment, the estate agent told me when I was signing the contract. An investment for life. Yet I had no interest in becoming a […]

Randall left work early again, feeling ill. Nothing definitive, a general fatigue, a general malaise—that was the word, although he’d never used it before. If he’d stayed in his chair another minute it would have required an army to get him out. He didn’t know where he belonged, but he didn’t belong there. The bus […]

To Whom It May Concern: I’m writing to inform you that I have recently moved into ____ House. I apologize for being circumspect about the name. I should probably just spit it out to make all of this easier, but what with copyright laws being as they are, it feels safer if I leave that […]

On this island we like to die slowly. Generationally. At the other side of the counter, Mamá stirs sancocho with the candlelight drawing tenderness onto her features. “I am lucky to have you,” she says. “Mi tesoro.” It is, really, all she ever says anymore. It worries her, the soundlessness when we go out. There […]

As she’s done every morning for the past ten years, Bobbie sits on the living room couch, watches Forensic Files, and eats protein powder. Her father’s face puckers sour when he watches her eat the white mix straight from the plastic tub with a spoon, but Bobbie eats it industriously, happily. She just wants her […]

Propped against the bathroom door, clutching an old guitar, Hanna sings Charlie another lullaby. Go to sleep, Charlie. He’s awake in there, still. The black beetles that come from under the bathroom door are his messengers. They walk ponderous circuits, antennae trembling, moving jerkily like windup toys. Sleep, Charlie, sleep. The guitar is held together […]

Mam sets aside the petticoat she’s hemming, makes a note in the piecework book, and unpicks the sleepy stitches in Maeve’s sampler. “Try again.” She passes the scrap of hessian back to her daughter, sighs. “Needlework teaches the virtues of patience, silence, and control.” Virtues. Maeve stabs new thread through the eye of her needle. […]

I am fifteen the first time my mother pays for me to see the octopus. Inside those yellowing tents with their black-stitched tears we are not supposed to see, my mother pushes coins toward the mustachioed attendant who looks at her breasts and then at mine. Smiling, he tears off two tickets and points in […]