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...
It was the off-season and we were left to the rain that mourned the tourists. Paddleboats masquerading as swans. Swans masquerading as boats. Gone were the slushies and sunblock and hey mom, can we ride these?! Gone were the city stalwarts and country obese that made...
To the centipede I tried to kick down my drain but refused to go. I see you there. Being better than eighty-two percent of the men I've dated. You creepy-crawled out of the drain. I screamed like an old-fashioned actress. High-pitched and startling. Then, I toed you...
The girl detective has just turned fourteen. She will be kidnapped a week before her fifteenth birthday, ice cream in the freezer, balloons wilting on the dining room table, birthday cake gone stiff and dry. The housekeeper will sweep up ashes from the girl...
The meteor fell from the sky and landed in the yard of the couple. It charred the grass and flattened the grill and sent the soccer ball whining until it was flaccid. It pulsed, a white and orange marbled planet, stoic, propelling waves of heat through the...
Alas, behind the garage where the trash cans are, hunched and weeping, your cousin Glenna says she is pregnant and you are the only one she can tell. You are ten--a boy--and she is fourteen; the two of you smoking grass. “It’s going to affect your little balls,”...
Their father drank Hamm’s when he finished his shift. After supper, on good days, he’d grab the boys and hang them upside down by their ankles and they’d scream and flail their arms and when he put them down, they’d ask him to do it again. He smelled of beer and hot...
Amelia hates it when people call her Amy. Amy is her mother’s name, she tells them, and her grandmother’s name. And she is nothing like them. She is educated. She is a career woman. She wears pants and a leather jacket and has short hair because she is a flyer. And...
I heard my daughter was working at Laundry & Tan Connection and hoped it wasn’t true but when I went inside, the bells on top of the door jingling to announce my arrival, she was standing behind the counter. “Jenny?” I said. She looked almost the same as...