Until I was twelve years old, my sister Cecilia read me bedtime stories about monsters. I sat up on the stained mattress next to her, my eyes wide and waiting. We were alone in the house, our father long gone and our mother at her midnight job or her midnight bar. “And what then?” I […]
Special Gin Fizz—gin, honey (replacement for simple syrup), soda water, lime juice and crushed juniper berries (Egg white if you can, but it’s just as good without) A change of seasons cocktail. I first tried this in the Cotswolds, in autumn. That year, spring barely whisked across the hills and summer was as soft and […]
I’ve seen things few other people in the world have ever seen. And it’s a pretty big world, you know. The expression ‘small world’ is a bullshit expression used to explain coincidence, if you believe in that sort of thing. I know you don’t, Jenny. “Everything happens for a reason,” you said once. As if […]
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 […]
Agog sits naked upon a hump, a fort as was, battlements now ghosts, where once a beacon burned in celebration or warning of some foreign foe, his bare arse nestled in a soft cushion of brambles and blackthorn, evicted sparrows having scattered, his thighs as hairy and filthy as his history. Agog is the last […]
As his taxi raced toward the dock Lee could see the water between buildings and at the end of streets, filling the space around and beyond distant spits of unfocused land. The ocean smelled like a liquefied cellar. His last time near the ocean was that summer at Myrtle Beach when he was nine. He’d […]
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 […]
It was my mother who gave me the zoetrope. She presented it to me for my birthday and I loved it at once, not for its own sake or even for the magic it wrought, but because it was something we could share. It was made of carved wood, with a floral design encircling the […]
