“This is it,” Lily said. It was just a smear of green on a lonely hill, an old cemetery in the middle of nowhere Bulgaria. Gravestones leaned like bad teeth, the names and dates long eroded. It was our ninth graveyard in three months and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Because the last […]

Aries: There is always an end to a ball of yarn, no matter how infinite the thread might seem. Don’t worry if the bindoffs look ugly. In sewing, the inside is always entrails. The daily horoscope has amber-colored stains where the newspaper met the humidity of dead skin. You stare at the blurry letters, thinking […]

The bombs had stopped falling. That was the first thing that struck Alice when the train pulled away, its smoke and roar fading into the distance, and she looked out across nothing but green for miles around. The silence crept into her, like long fingers snaking down her throat, and she felt she no longer […]

All that remained of Chana came back from Kraków in a little wooden box: a golden chain with a pendant, a palm facing out with a carved unblinking eye to protect from evil. Chana’s death lived on the mantle in the main room of the house, where it would gather dust if Rochel didn’t clean […]

The monitor only allowed one-way communication, so although Danni could listen to her child if she needed to, she could not respond, like a one-way mirror, she thought, in a police interrogation room, but then the baby couldn’t respond anyway, not yet, and her brother had given her the device. It was the first, she […]

You and Bromwick set the town afire. Crumbled dwellings backdropped to curtains of smoke. Because you were sick. Are sick. Because—you can’t remember why you did it. You remember The Fire, but dissociatively, like a nightmare. Like you and your brother weren’t really there. Out of bed, out in the road, after curfew. Dirt caked […]

Sometimes sorrow falls into such a deep place it cannot escape. When Charlie saw the first evidence of vandalism at the summer house—gouges in the front steps, the screen door ripped away and in pieces, the inner door off its hinges and lying inside—he sank onto the porch and wept. It had been a terrible […]

The Faceless The night grows younger, warmer, and fonder. Rock hands held hers with a firm grip. The fourteen-year-old young girl wore navy-blue fur boots, jean and a carrot blouse. The rock hands belonged to her Papa whom she accompanied to a convention at twilight. They floated through the crowd side by side with their […]

Malik had worked in hospitality all of his adult life. He was a seasoned pro. He’d seen celebrities, and politicians pass through the lobbies of the hotels where he’d worked. He’d seen ambulance crews rush out dying guests on gurneys, and once, a pregnant woman’s water broke as she was checking in. From drunken rowdy […]

In the late afternoon of August 18th, 20—, as he reclined comfortably on his upstairs bed, Wentworth Thomas—Dr. Thomas to students at his university, Wen to his colleagues and friends, Wennie to no one but his wife Marguerite, who really should have been home by now—set on the nightstand the book he had been perusing, […]