Fiction

But there was no leaving me to silently watch the rise and fall of his chest. The voices weren’t going away. They were impossible to ignore.

It was two in the morning. The drum of sadness beat inside her until the building pressure pushed tears out, until she could only see the blur around her. She…

You, Big Sister, listen close when Mom talks like that. You do this partly out of concern for Aunt Louisa, and partly because you want Mom to let you buy…

She tried to understand him, would ask him over dinner what he was doing all those hours in his room. He gave terse answers out of the side of his…

The double-helix structure of DNA allows for replication, but yours has unwound, a single spiral staircase tapering off into a singular void. Rick refuses to uncouple, says having a genetic…

She abandoned the tests on the marble vanity and the jar of night-cream under the toilet. In her slippers, no bra, hair amiss, she walked out of the house.

The child cries out, and Janet, half-asleep, dashes down the hall to the nursery before the next cry. The second round will be louder, escalating to deafening, the same pattern…

I look in the mirror at my unbrushed gray hair. The deep wrinkles that sank in overnight, tunneling.

As a girl, I gorged on mulberries that grew in our yard, ruining so many dresses that my mother beat me. Every year she threatened to chop those bushes down,…

Before I wake up, I’m in the middle of telling you something. I want you to fix the toilet, rake the yard, paint the shed. In my dream, I’m running…

She still hasn’t cried. Not really. She has tried, of course, especially at the funeral when it was expected. But when she isn’t angry, she is a hollowed-out shell that…