Ghosts know who best to haunt. An old Jamaican friend once told her that. She thinks about this idea a lot, after the velvet man leaves. About what it is to be drawn to something just for you: a perfectly fashioned event, a person, or a moment. It is the kind of thing that people […]
Laura is a dead girl’s name. That’s your first thought when she introduces herself, all smiles, telling you about cheerleader tryouts like you aren’t dressed from head to toe in get-the-fuck-away-from-me. Pretty blondes like her are always ending up dead somewhere, in lakes or forests, murdered by someone who insists they did it out of […]
It is across a distance of many years that I remember the events of 1846, and yet it might have been yesterday that I first heard the voice that haunts my dreams. It is not the words that have troubled me so, ever since I was a boy; it is the way they were spoken—and […]
The daughter hates this new country with its methodical streets and packed supermarkets, hates the way every inch of space has been scrubbed clean of character, hates her teacher who speaks to her slowly and loudly as if she is deaf instead of merely unfamiliar with a language that follows no logic. America is devoid […]
“Woolf.” The word caused Paige to flinch in the passenger seat. She scanned the leaf-carpeted banks of the road, looking for signs of movement. “It was Virginia Woolf who took her life that way, not Brontë,” Jon explained, “my mistake. Wait, did you think I saw an actual . . . ” “You gave me a start,” she said […]
1961 I am six years old when, one summer afternoon as the sun beats down and rolls sweat down my neck, my sister yells, “Catch, Judith!” She launches her porcelain doll at my head. I am one second older when it slips through my fingers and shatters on the concrete driveway at my feet. I […]
I was thirteen and a half the first time I killed a man. It was an accident and I was dreadfully sorry about it at the time. L, I was called. It was spelled with more letters than that, but L is what it sounded like. I’d lived a childhood pretty as a picture, even […]
For many Latin American families, Disney World represents the embodiment of desire and illusion. The journey to Paradise is offered as a prize in an infinite (because they reproduce and reappear) number of contests. To reach Paradise is a sign of prosperity, the result of a stroke of good luck, the promise of rich relatives, […]
1. Dublin June He had been surprised at how rapidly he had forgotten her as a physical being. There were dozens, hundreds, of photos, of course, to remind him what she looked like, but unless they were in front of him, he found he could not recall her face. He would try, and fail, and […]
Three in the morning. A quarter heavy with sleep, heaving its groggy way into the sunrise. Little Tatu lying on her bed, eyes open, heart racing. Then she hears it—the hum soft and low, like a slight breeze in the air. And then there she is, the dead girl, alive. She only comes to her […]
