10. When I woke up yesterday morning, I saw how Mom had spelled out HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE in magnetic poetry on the fridge before she left for work. It was a stupid thing to write. I knew from hunting with Jill what real hell looked like. But I also knew what Mom really meant: […]

I hadn’t yet asked Mom if I could stay. Stalling, I pressed my thumbnail to palm in rows of crescent moons, the sun fading to a shimmering yolk behind the trees. A gust of wind sent them swaying, cottonwoods leaning toward the sugar maples. Budding branches clinked together as if passing on a whisper. As […]

Six months following his death I began having my father’s dreams. I hadn’t seen him in years, but to my surprise he left his house to me. It’s an understatement to say we were estranged. My father was a monster. The house was a small bungalow built sometime between the world wars on Alphabet Row, […]

Hell is a city much like London—Percy Bysshe Shelley When Mrs Fernyhough was found dead, her landlady was on holiday. The police were called to the squat, dank house just off Commercial Street, that funereal enclave of post-war decay, where she had rented the attic room for the past ten years. Miss Fletcher, her downstairs […]

When the war came, Paul was evacuated one morning. He was put firmly on the train and waved off into the west. London, they told him, was a death trap, even though his side was going to win anyway. These words filled him with anxiety and hope at the same time, but both emotions faded […]

There are buzzards in the fields around where I live. I never thought ours was the sort of town that would have buzzards, or any kind of big bird like that—not vulture types. We’re more of a pigeon place. Blackbirds and blue tits. Seagulls, sometimes, at a push. But no, we have buzzards. And the […]

It wasn’t even Halloween, technically. It was the day after, at your company’s annual Halloween party, and it was late and you were drunk, so when Susan suggested a short-cut through the cemetery you didn’t hesitate. You’d follow Susan anywhere. You remembered a song from your teens: Went down to the cemetery, looking for love […]

Does it look different? Zoe asked, tilting her head. Tom stopped in the hallway outside the bedroom and glanced back. Does what look different? he asked. Zoe shrugged her right shoulder, rolled it forward, rolled it back. My arm, she said. This arm. She waggled the fingers of her hand. The fingers felt different. The […]

“You’ll be needing a spade.” Uncle Don indicates the black-iron pot by the door. It bristles with gardening tools the way other people have umbrella stands. Around it is a tumble of men’s shoes in a litter of crumbled-off mud. A far cry from the kitchen at home, white-tiled like a science lab, or a […]

i. Rumen We come because there is a war in the old country. We come because there is a drought that becomes a famine or because we woke up one day and suddenly our money was worthless, or because we have always practiced the wrong religion but recently, since the last election, our neighbors look […]