After signing the divorce papers, I get in my car and drive the three hours to my sister’s house. I can smell the ocean from her driveway as soon as I open my door. “Yes, Jesus, thank you,” Beth says when I offer to take Nelly and Grandma to the beach. It’s freezing,...
She’s seventeen years old and standing at a bus stop in East Texas. It’s raining, and her hair is pulled into a ponytail. She’s wearing a backpack, and on the bench beside her is a green duffel bag with a broken strap. The bus is late. Her shoes are wet, and the...
This la-de-da woman waltzes in. Skinny. Shiny-lipped. Designer facelift. Lenny, the crabbiest waiter, with his crater face, his cigarette breath, his lady-I-ain’t-got-all-day shrug, shuffles over to her booth. She, in her crispness, looks up at him in the space of his...
The autumn chill permeated Ruth’s wool coat as she hurried through the forest, dried leaves crunching underfoot. She clutched her satchel laden with contraband. If her parents found these candles, herbs, oils, and feathers plucked from her pillows, they’d demand...
“He’s bleeding out!” These words stampede through the air, disembodied from their owner. “Somebody help him!” I stand on the museum steps. When the words reach me, I am unsteadied by their desperate velocity, and I wobble on the bottom step. I hope they have reached...
We went to the museum, but we didn’t see anything good. We sat on a long bench under the great T-Rex, frozen in midroar. Outside, your son wound his way through a fake rainforest, raised pathways running under and over each other. He had darted for the doors as soon...
In the first month of the year after the holiday season she felt out of sorts (the season she got the diagnosis, the season the doctor gave her a referral to the Giant Hospital), Barbara bought things. She awoke every day with the phrase carpe diem on a looping...
In 2023, the island known in County Kerry as the Sleeping Giant, named for its resemblance to a man lying on his back, exhaled. Those first few people to see it were quick to dismiss the notion they must have seen mist rising or a flock of gulls. For, as they...
The giant orb in the night sky makes our friend’s house look like a doll’s house. One of us mentions this and another of us scoffs, “As if.” We clutch sleeping bags in our arms, plain ones without characters. We borrow them from older siblings, or our parents buy them...
My son…he’s a good boy. I hug him as often as I can. Casey is almost five now, but he’s small for his age, so he feels more like a three-year-old. I want to hug him like this forever. I want him to hug me back like this forever – with both arms and legs and all of his...
When the first of the last coughs come, I take my father to the sea. I know he likes it there. Every time memory resurfaces and reveals his previous life—before my mother, before me, long before the sting of IV lines and the smell of disinfectant—he talks about all...
We were sitting in the stadium waiting for the Face. It came at 6:45, right-center field, or that’s what I’d heard because I hadn’t seen it yet. I was there with my son and one of his friends from the city league—Kierran or Kellan, scrawny kid from the west side....