We have to hold our breath inside the hospital. On the roof, I take my brother’s small hand and remind him of the rules. “Twenty breaths on the top floor. Take one less on each next one.” At his sour, puckered-lip frown, I add, “It’s good practice for counting.” In the time before we could […]

Marion took the House Mother job the day before her twenty-fifth birthday. Not an old maid by any stretch of the imagination, but with her oatmeal-colored cardigan and sensible shoes, the honey blondes who traipsed in and out of Zeta Tau saw her as something worthy of blending in with the wallpaper. A warning of […]

It’s a dark and stormy night, and the residents of the Castle Arms apartments are watching a scary movie. On the small, bulbous screens of their television sets, a killer stalks in scratchy chiaroscuro. A detective—handsome in that bland, leading man way—is explaining to a blonde-headed reporter. “They call him the Sandman, because he strangles […]

You are outside of your body, looking down at yourself on the hospital bed surrounded by family and strangers alike with smiles too eerie, too joyous, for the airlessness of the suffocating atmosphere. Next to you, Mother stands, eyes rimmed crimson, lids both above and below swollen, purple veined, pulsing, twitching, bluing lips holding back […]