Fiction

My mother-in-law waited in her hospital room while my husband and I sat in the doctor’s office. Our son, Kei, slept across my lap, his temple sweating against my forearm.…

I hurry home, pull into the driveway, open the trunk, and grab all six plastic grocery bags. Dropping the bags on the kitchen counter, I go out to the living…

I let Timmy stay home the next day. I take some aspirin and go to work. “You look like shit,” Janice says when she settles in at eight-twenty. “I stopped…

The day was the way you’d paint it, with Gauguin blue for sky, sweet dianthus in the air and the future floating all of us right off the chinky concrete…

First, One Child… When the bus pulled up, exhaust stirred candy wrappers, bits of yellowed leaves, and empty cigarette packages in the gutter. Annette pushed Jane’s small face into her…

Zoë slept like an old drunk or a well-run dog, mouth open, completely surrendered. Though it had taken fourteen rounds of harmonizing “Pop Goes the Weasel” with the worn-out sing-along…

They weren’t sure their mother had a face. When she read to them at bedtime, she sat on the edge of the bed, turned away. When they had nightmares, she…

I’m drinking coffee at the kitchen table and eating honey nut Cheerios with slices of banana. When I open the newspaper, I see the headline, “San Andreas Zoo Welcomes Two…

~ William ~ It usually means deer: the rustling sound behind the house, the crunch of dried leaves underfoot. The doe and her two fawns come stepping delicately down the…

“Why are you so late?” asks Salvador from the curb. A rhetorical question, my son well knows, one with a million reasons for it, one with no real answer at…