The kitchen lightbulb shatters above our heads. The filament burns red and fizzles to nothing. It is an explosion from light to black. We breathe hard in the aftermath, check each other for broken glass and he says to me, I can’t be here anymore. # Chicago-Read is...
Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong. It's really just meant to be a simple, two-word phrase to let people talk about a particular shade. "Honey, do you prefer Autumn Sand or Copper Slate?" or "Can I get two gallons of Alpine Storm?" ...
That morning, Ted began buffering. One minute, he was Ted, coffee cup in hand, talking animatedly about this thing he’d just heard on NPR. The next minute, he was a rainbow-colored pinwheel, spinning. I’d never taken Ted for a Mac guy, so I found that part odd. If...
Walls Her nest is too tall by the time Molly realizes she can’t climb in. “I left my tools inside. Should I stop?” She asks her husband, who looks at the wall so hard the plaster cracks. “Put some of those plaster shards around the outside, honey? Like a fence, you...
As if covered in invisible glaze, her bread bakes pink. She buys new flour, new yeast, sends it into the oven a butter yellow moon. Still it comes out pink, a darker shade each time. "It must be the water here. We'll get filtered; don't eat it," her husband...
These days, when I pull up the old photographs, most people still attribute the resemblance between Lydia Lissing and me to the uniforms. My husband, who has always refused to see it, has never gotten past this first reluctance. “You all look like...
waiting to cross. My heart tick, ticking like a stupid clock. Eddie and his dark hair forest, his blue eye ocean. Eddie, who is only 15. But to me, he is a man. In five years, I will catch up. By then, I will be beautiful. My hair will be a riverflow. Eddie...
It was a bright, gray day with no breeze, and she had just finished digging a grave. She’d woken that morning and her turtle had not. How should she feel on this first day without Tulip? Or on all the days without Tulip to come? Sad, probably. But sometimes being with...
Bette was stirring her coffee when she saw the postcard, tucked between a large print arthritis monthly and debt consolidation offers. On the front was a rose window. She turned it over, expecting to learn that Jesus loved her, or God would smite her. Finally taking a...
Maggie has clouds for eyes. Also, she barely talks. Other kids have asked her how those clouds got stuck there, but she just blinks back, clouds churning. My best friend, Bernice Wallers, heard Maggie used to have eyes like ours, that fire ants devoured them while she...
I was the one who took the photograph of the princess with her toes in the mouth of a man who was not her husband. I didn’t mean to take it. I was sent to pap them and I did not want to be there, not one bit. It had been a long day and a hard one. I leaned against the...
These are the things you may not do: You may not hide in or under your bed without speaking for weeks, time stretching cobweb-damp as the bright world rushes by outside.You may not be unseemly in public.You may not develop a drug problem.You may not drive thirteen...