Fiction

We begin to bleed in bedrooms, on subways, in soup kitchens and dentist office lines. We begin with secret exaltation, rereading sections of Our Bodies, Ourselves, checking out our budding…

A firefly lit and dimmed beneath a fingernail moon. She moved the flashlight around the yard, its concentric circles spotlighting Eli’s wading pool, which was half-deflated now, with a shiny,…

She handed the computer back to the FedEx guy, who gave her a flabby, perfunctory sort of grin, the kind of grin that indicated that he had seen the red…

Of course I pushed it, she’s my mother. I had right on my side, I thought. But he hated it here, he hated the uncertainty. When he woke in the…

She didn’t always have trouble remembering. Or maybe she did. So many things confused her, like the passage of time, the minutes scattering away like marbles, rolling under the sofa.…

They were a family in transition, and although she understood this was normal, she grieved for the way things used to be. This trip to the mall was an olive…

Andy had grieved with her, but he was beginning to surface. He’d mention their son every once in a while, ask her if she remembered different parts of her pregnancy,…

She never draws Martin’s attention to the top of her closet, to the carton she keeps here, shoved well back on the shelf. This box is not an ordinary dull…

I seen them come into the store. The mother, all buttoned-up and beige. The older girl, dark-haired and fussy. Braces. Squeaky-voiced. And then, the littler one, in light-up shoes and…

They sit facing each other in the whispering shade of a tropical bush, lighted from below, leaves making shadow puppets on the trunks of the palm trees. They turn their…

When I sent the email asking my father to call, I knew I needed to keep the whole day free. Or the whole weekend. Even though his email said he’d…