There were five of us at the start: mother, father, Ren, Penelope, and me. And now there is only me. Since mother and father passed, the garden’s upkeep has been lacking. They gave us enough knowledge to maintain the garden, but not enough to allow it to thrive. And since Penelope left, more than one […]
The maids were busy with breakfast when Rosalía returned to her ancestral home, one hundred and eighty-four years after she left, known by no one. The house she found was not the house of her memories: the original building was demolished and rebuilt in fashionable Italianate style, three stories tall, with narrow windows, quoin, a […]
The first time I saw the operculum necklace, it made me cry. Such a thing was scarcely unlikely: I was only six years old and had never seen such a thing before. Strung on a silver chain and adorned here and there with filigree, the necklace consisted of six discs that some might consider decorative. […]
In the cold dawn light, they carry the child out of the big house and down to the pond. The water is grey with submerged ice, striated mud frozen hard to its banks, and the reeds are swollen within whitish sheaths. The child is sickly. It shrieks and shrieks as they lower its thin body […]
It’s Monday morning when Magda Doubinsky discovers all her chickens are dead. Slaughtered Every egg crushed too. A poultry genocide. Even from here I can see the bright red flecks on the snow. Not just near the ramshackle coop, but scattered the length and breadth of the front yard. Feathers too, although only the dark-coloured […]
A spinning top, a blur at first, then settling into a rapid, humming focus. Mom spoke a language that we gathered and pieced together, tested and retested until we got the desired results. Images lacked context, seemed to drift from us the longer we stared. There was an embedded familiarity within the walls of the […]
There have been three particularly severe summers in Bowers during my lifetime, the entirety of which I have lived in this small town, and while I shall write to some extent of all three, it is the first that concerns these papers most. I was a child at the time, of that age where I […]
Essex, 1647 In the shadows of dusk, Many-Shapes comes, through the woods and over the meadow, fleet to my devilish summoning. First, there’s a sound between the gnarled oaks, a pop of inrushing air, followed by the faint tang of sulphur. I sit in my frock with all the Patience for which I’ve been named, […]
Families moved into the underwater pods at staggered times, so we never met our neighbors. On the long car ride to the ocean, as the air became saltier and the types of trees changed outside the windows, it felt like a beach trip. In the trunk, in Dad’s cooler, ice sloshed around as it melted. […]
Devyn visits the Winchester Mystery House on a rainy day in San Jose. The house is a mess of architectural features, all spindlework and stickwork, red scalloped shingles, rooms jutting out everywhere—an asymmetrical madness. Despite this chaos, the house is beautiful, with yellow walls and so many windows. An enormous layer cake of a house, […]
