The 90-year-old producer had a hole in his heart. A shaky, unpatchable hole. He wanted me to fill it with kisses, candy, and jokes. I handed him a travel-sized Mars bar that I got on the plane. "Only a monkey," he said, "would offer this old sack of bones a gift from...
It was like she’d gotten sober all over again; everything started to make sense after Daniel’s arrest. Like the occasional odd scent on his clothes that she’d always assumed was because of his commute, emerging from the train with the scent of every Bostonian on his...
I hold on so tightly I lose my grip. The hubcap clatters to the floor like a platter thrown during a lovers’ spat. “Go to hell!” I yell, then, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” I pull on a pair of gray sweats and a dirty white T-shirt. Four red lines bleed through the...
The setting sun made a fire deep in the amber of its eye, unblinking and somehow changed. Blood shone like tree sap inside a dark nostril. The body lay on its side. The older of the two boys grabbed one leg and the younger the other, and with heels digging and...
When we were just teenagers, this friend of mine bought a suit of armor. To get it, he worked an extra job and saved every penny. And he could talk of nothing else. Before I ever saw it, I knew how thick the plating would be, how the various pieces would connect and...
It’s a deer in the weeds at the side of the road, or maybe a golden lab? Something that makes sense of all that yellow in the late-afternoon sun. Too late, my brain trips over the bright blue shirt, and I’m already down the highway when I take my foot off the gas. A...
When we saw the hot pink Barbie-branded Corvette sitting in our neighbor’s trash pile, we hesitated. Aggie and Tim were our summertime neighbors, kids who lived next door three months out of the year with their grandma, our full-time neighbor. Aggie liked to say their...
Gretel wakes in the middle of the night with the kind of hunger that claws at your insides, as if it were a feral creature trying to get back to the woods. She hears Hansel’s soft breathing in the dark, the faint sound of jazz downstairs, and the distant, tremulous...
James was grieving the death of his father, who’d mistrusted Michaela. Too dark a horse, he’d warned. She’d be the one to break him. James had told Michaela this in bed, laughing, after a good and unhurried sexual encounter, the night their daughter was conceived. The...
We have nine snowmen in our front yard. One snow child. In the past month or two, I rolled, lifted, and balanced balls of snow for their snow bodies, searched for sturdy twigs. My wife peeled carrots, dumped raisins in a dish, ransacked closets for hats and...
I’m riding shotgun with our big grandma of a fridge sticking out the back. She’s sandwiched between the hatch and the rusted bumper, tied by the rope from my tire swing. I rub her smooth metal top where she held my cereal. We’re headed to the dump. It’s where Dad...
We stand in front of the cameras dressed in red, white, and blue. We clutch pocketbooks and pearls, pull the silk scarves woven loose through our arms around bare shoulders. We smile into the lens with an unwavering tenacity we hope convinces the rest of the world—and...