I like to sleep in other people’s empty houses. For a long time now, the only place I’ve found real rest is in a stranger’s bed. It makes me feel safe, being somewhere no one would think to look for me. My own apartment is haunted. It took me discovering an old can of Luke’s […]
It started with him taking forever in the bathroom—thirty-minute showers, an hour in the tub, a shower in the morning and every evening. On weekends, he started having a bath at midday as well. I assumed the obvious thing, in terms of what he was probably up to. But then I added it up one […]
Connor’s grandfather leaned over him, cracked lips making a tortured “O.” In that long moment all he could hear was the depthless pulse of the world. His grandfather wasn’t a mean man. He never raised his voice to Connor, and he certainly never raised his hand. The old man supplied his grandson with unsettling lessons […]
It was only a few weeks after my mother’s funeral when my father told me not to come home again. If not for the coldness of his voice, I might have assumed he was passive-aggressively trying to shame me for having stayed for so short a time, having returned to my son and my husband. […]
They found the first coffin in North America, in Vancouver, BC, at a graveyard. The slender mahogany box was no larger than the forearm of a child of ten. The workers were digging up a slot for an upcoming burial of an important political figure that I were hired to document. This was meant to […]
Nothing lasts forever. Not Christmas, with its bright lights and spangled promises of good things that never quite come to pass. Not the dreams of magic that it conjures for children everywhere. Not even Krampus, with his sack of coal and his cold heart. Even villains grow old and achy, age softening their sharp edges, […]
Here it is, your father says as he pulls up to the club, the car headlights making bright meat of the young people queuing outside. The eater of my youth, he says, so many good nights here, proper good, lad, you have no idea. He licks his lips and says a name that could be […]
I kept my right eye closed because I saw ghosts through it. My parents thought they were imaginary friends I would soon outgrow—they weren’t. But what did they know anyway? “One—or two?” my optometrist asked, switching lenses. “Two,” I said. He repeated the process until I recited the words on the eye exam chart a […]
At dusk, Benji watched the other boys make a game out of turning on every light in every room they could find, until all of Palazzo di Bacco glittered on its bluff high above the Pacific like a neoclassical temple of marble and light illuminated from within. Their pretentious host—who names his own house “Palazzo […]
When they first come to our street, the blue jacarandas are in bloom, like they always are from September to December. Darkened seed pods fell on the pavement and crack under their shoes like eggshells, tiny bits of wood flying everywhere. It’s so beautiful, they tell us, smiling, eyes on the trees. It’s so beautiful […]
