Fiction

Elsa shielded her eyes from the harsh sunlight as it broke across the horizon. Its rays set off clusters of crystalline reflections as they touched the solid expanse of white…

If they could have known how it would turn out — how they would join the ranks of fractured families raising kids every other weekend and on Wednesdays — I…

She’d just pulled The Happiest Toddler from the shelf when she saw something surreal: a midget in a red and yellow clown suit diving through the air.

What do I want of you, Mario? Your dark eyes pleading. The distant eyes of a poet or a future murderer. You’re doomed. You think I don’t know that? And…

She’d been hanging laundry on the balcony when she first heard the keening moans — low and feline rising to nearly the screech of a tom. Not until he’d turned…

Life here should be different. They had moved to Vermont for community, for closeness as well as simplicity and safety. But the winter had come and snowed them in, and…

The first time I lied about my mother it was easy. “She’s dead,” I said through the bare wooden posts of the fence that divided our yard from the Bryant’s.…

Her parents. She tried to find her mother in the crowd just before she refocused on the photographer. Mother would most likely be standing near Aunt Shirley. Nancy’s father hadn’t…

I could have been spending my afternoons shelving library books or organizing groceries at the food pantry, but no, I had to sign up for the cat shelter: sift cat…

A red leather miniskirt caught Serena’s attention. For less than a second, she felt sad that a girl so young was an airport hooker before she recognized her own daughter.…

One evening in early October, as Ellie was reading to me from