The dead flowers lie amid a pile of sea-wrack, where fronds of oar-weed mingle with bits of old rope and broken razor shells and plastic bottle tops and the ever-present sand. She stares at them a moment: a sorry bundle of what might once have been lilies and roses, now all but unrecognisable. Still, she […]
The alpha-posters on our local Facebook ‘mommy’ group call the wishing well park a hidden gem. The hidden part is right: it’s tucked at the end of a cul-de-sac, obscured by dense pines. I must have walked past the top of the street a hundred times in the year Sadie insisted on napping in her […]
He turns, head raised, inhaling. Shale and sedge underfoot, and then a tight slope down to the line of scrub before the hill breaks off into the forest of the valley. The branches flex and quiver above us, praying into the dark. The scratch of bramble on my bare calf, a line of sweat on […]
The double line of stationary vehicles stretched for nearly a mile along the narrow access road before disappearing into the distant woods. Andy’s car sat in the right-hand lane. He was boxed in by a blue minivan on the left, a white two-door directly in front, and a black-bodied, chrome-grilled, muscle car directly behind. The […]
“Love and hate are so entwined that if thoughts could kill, we’d all be dead in the bosom of our families.”—Dr. Sigmund Freud It was the first thing I ever saw in my analyst’s office, and I was struck that anyone would embroider a phrase like that into a sampler, the embroidery thread all in […]
London, 1854 Luella lamented that seventy-one was too old to receive the news about Cross Bones Cemetery, with its dead poking out of the ground. The family lawyer, Arthur Barrows, had come to her townhouse one evening last week and in his usual mordant manner informed her that due to the new Burial Act, a […]
Insolent pattern, this: the spackling of corrupted metal where his lips wetted it every night. Insolent comfort, too: the way the boat extended an internal pipe of dragon-nail or chitinite or some such, it didn’t matter, from the tumble of planks that made the walls of the hold. This is where Anefthyn suckled. This is […]
Millie’s daughter came back twenty days after her death. This was not surprising, since everybody came back twenty days after their death. What was surprising, though, was that Ariana chose to come back as a young woman, even though she was only ten when she was struck by a passing car. The driver had been […]
It was a smell at first, a reek climbing out of Cheta’s body. Like the stabbing whiff of rats’ urine. Something, sharp enough to draw blood, clawed at his skin while he slept. Then it stretched out even though Cheta was not willing to cede any space for it. It prowled his physical world as […]
We don’t choose the skin we live in, she’d said. Our little fish girl. She knifed through water like a hungry seal, sleek and black. Our little fish girl, swimming the darkness. It had started as a small pinkish patch of skin on Olivia’s cheek. It was diamond-shaped, the size of a small button and […]
