You are outside of your body, looking down at yourself on the hospital bed surrounded by family and strangers alike with smiles too eerie, too joyous, for the airlessness of the suffocating atmosphere. Next to you, Mother stands, eyes rimmed crimson, lids both above and below swollen, purple veined, pulsing, twitching, bluing lips holding back […]
It’s a dark and stormy night, and the residents of the Castle Arms apartments are watching a scary movie. On the small, bulbous screens of their television sets, a killer stalks in scratchy chiaroscuro. A detective—handsome in that bland, leading man way—is explaining to a blonde-headed reporter. “They call him the Sandman, because he strangles […]
Marion took the House Mother job the day before her twenty-fifth birthday. Not an old maid by any stretch of the imagination, but with her oatmeal-colored cardigan and sensible shoes, the honey blondes who traipsed in and out of Zeta Tau saw her as something worthy of blending in with the wallpaper. A warning of […]
We have to hold our breath inside the hospital. On the roof, I take my brother’s small hand and remind him of the rules. “Twenty breaths on the top floor. Take one less on each next one.” At his sour, puckered-lip frown, I add, “It’s good practice for counting.” In the time before we could […]
I should start by saying that I did not care for my younger sister Helen. She had been raised by my father to be loud and rude and selfish, and heedless of the feelings of others. Even so, she was my sister, and we endured each other as siblings often do. After our father abandoned […]
Sorrow I’ll tell this first part of the tale as you told me, dear brother, since you can’t bear to tell it anymore. Not even to yourself. I want you to understand how things came to this pass. Brian Coin, that black-haired boy like a rail-thin raven, saw him too, you know, walking through the […]
Its windows had been facing the Pacific the first time she saw the house—a two-story wall of glass like the rest, all glittering beacons on cliffs dark with trees. The gray water below frothed into white crests, dashing and drooling between teeth-like formations along the cove. Marta Montejo closed her eyes and tightly gripped her […]
The grass died that sweltering, fey summer, and the wildflowers, and the garden tomatoes, and the corn maze Dad had planted in the top field. (Mam said he’d been watching too many American movies; Dad said we had to keep the lights on somehow and everyone had a gimmick these days.) The canal that ran […]
Pot boiling. Vegetables chopped. Rice cooking. Meat marinated. Stream drifts outward from the mosquito screen of the cracked open window of our single room unit nestled in a stray corner of Chinatown, Toronto. Newspaper crinkles under my fingers, ink seeping into the skin in dark smudges as I kneel to smooth out the folds across […]
Crossing through the woods on the edge of the waste ground she heard it screaming in the night and at first she thought it a child or a young woman, in extremis: wordless, chopped-up glossolalia of pain, somehow finding breath to start another shriek even before the preceding had finished tearing its way free of […]
