Fiction

At Café Roma, Bonnie and her daughter, Margo, sit across from one another, a short yellow candle burning between them. Margo’s hair, newly cut, is short and defiant. Yesterday, on…

“Hey, little girl, I can read your address,” said the heavyset woman at the end of the bench. She nodded at my four-year-old and said, “She got her skirt up…

The room was washed in the palest of light. Perhaps if the mullioned windows were cleaner the light might be brighter, but they were not; and so the light was…

Jacob is sitting in the sand busily burying his toes. Near him, on a royal blue velour blanket, his mother is filing her nails and squinting at the sand-filled pages…

My mother sent me an envelope with her picture in it, so I’d recognize her at the Port Authority bus terminal. On the back of the photograph she wrote, “Dear…

He is the only student wearing a bucket on his head. The Tumbling Toddlers teacher, Sergei, nods, bites his lip and says, “Ross, if the bucket defines you, you keep.”…

The baby’s eyes were not brown like those of her parents. They were blue: a dark, dark blue that strayed almost into black. It was a color that made Sara…

Anne had no idea how much time had passed since she’d closed her book. It still lay in her lap, her hands pressed against the dust cover. The gathering sweat…

Ask the Cat came free with the car the winter a lot of things came free for me. A couple months after I left my house and husband and moved…

Grandpa made peach whiskey. The peaches fermented in a barrel he kept in the dining room near the pot-belly stove. The house smelled like fruity corpses. Grandma said he couldn’t…

My daughter never smiles any more. It’s a shame because she always had such lovely teeth. I blame her lack of humor on that crazy job. Teresa calls it a…