She was a lover of history, of the remembrances of generations gone before. She believed it grounded her. It reinforced that she belonged to a time and place of her own, and soothed the rudderless feeling that sometimes swept over her. Recently she had taken to wandering the local graveyard, next to the Church of […]
“It’s not enough to be ugly, right, you freak?” the children would laugh. “You have to live in an ugly house, too.” Every day, Olga heard variations of this cruelty. To her classmates, she and the house were the same thing, as if one explained the ugliness of the other. Throughout her tortuous school years, […]
The magnolias were in full bloom the day Miralyn Liang found the envelope addressed to her, penned in her dead mother’s hand. Tucking it in her dress pocket, she climbed back down the ladder, wincing as her bare feet hit the cold concrete of the garage floor. If Laura had been there, she’d have insisted […]
It started with a dream about a grey boy who called my name. Charlie. Charlie . . . Charlie. How do you know my name? You told it to me in a dream. My dream or your dream? Yes. I grew up powdered-milk, water-down-the-ketchup poor; on a diet of soupy mac-and-cheese and fried bologna. Fruit was a luxury. […]
I got to meet the cold thing living inside my dad that June I turned fifteen. I don’t know how long it’d been hiding in him. Maybe always. Or maybe he’d caught it, the way you catch a cold, that night he dove to the oyster beds. All I know is, on that blanched coral […]
The loser’s dead, the text read. How do you know? Asha sat down in her office chair. She’d been about to go across the street to buy her regular chicken wrap for lunch but her growling stomach could wait. There wasn’t any need for her to clarify the identity of the deceased. The only person […]
A new green mound of earth sits at the corner of 4th and Nicollet like a miniature oblong meadow. So bright against the gray expanse of the city. Ivory daisies bloom from it, begging the sun to slice through the smog. The Minneapolis Environmental Relocation Services have already arrived. A MERS worker wearing an offensively […]
Two days into Fosters’ Woods they found the skeleton. Ralph, Aaron’s pit bull, pulled it out of a tangled deadfall and rhododendron hell. The poor dog struggled, making groaning and scuffing noises, dragging his damaged hind legs through layers of leaf rot and dead tree debris. It was the densest stretch of vegetation they’d encountered […]
Steph doesn’t come into town much. When she does, she goes straight to the pub. Standing behind the bar, rubbing a thin towel on the inside of an empty schooner, Helen feels Steph before she sees her. Never been able to say what it is that makes her just know. She slips the phone out […]
On June 17, 2004, six students and two faculty members from Saint Ilia’s School for Gifted Girls were found dead. A not altogether shocking occurrence, as mishaps of the fatal variety often happen when one thousand powered teenagers are crammed under one roof, and with a fire conveniently destroying much of the school, there is […]
