The Thompson kids’ dad sold the black walnut trees behind their house for timber and now clusters of big sad stumps spoiled the backyard. Tess was living with and caring for the kids—ten-year-old Miles and eight-year-old Minnie—while the Thompson mom recovered in some facility for broken-down women and the Thompson dad drove a long-haul truck …
It was a patient, Mr. Clayton, who told Nell about the Traveling Hall of Wax, while at her office to replace a cracked molar. After measuring the gap and gluing in a temporary crown, Dr. Klein left Nell to clean up. “Spit,” she said. Mr. Clayton spit. “You know Taylor Swift? I mean, I know …
Emma had never really considered her body, or rather, its temporality before. Illness was a little-thought-of inconvenience, something that came and then went, a brief interruption that required little in the way of meditation. A more formidable opponent as one grew old, perhaps, but that was a long way off. Illness had nothing to do …
The crows started fighting early that morning. Their sawmill-keyed rants from a nearby tree made it impossible to continue sleeping, but I refused to open my eyes. I lie in bed watching as the white letters C-R-O-W-S appeared singly before a sea of black feathers, the opening credits of a scratchy Super 8. In this …
We started making prank calls some nights after we’d gone out dancing, Lana and me, when we were in between drunk and hyped and couldn’t get to sleep right away. We were too old for it of course but that made it all the more novel. We hadn’t known each other when it was a …
For a handful of years when I was young, I spent two weeks of every summer at my Aunt Maureen’s house in northern Michigan. These visits stopped when I turned thirteen, after I started picking up far too much of what happened between the adults who lived there. Instead, I was packed off to the …
Already for some time, Noah had been watching his wife disappear. She’d once had an impish nose and thick gray hair; now the nose was long and sleek, and while Noah went gray, Penny’s gray was vanishing. She was getting blonder by the day. In the old photos that hung around the house, bursts of …
Business has been shit since the protestors showed up. Every morning for the last month, they’ve met me with bad attitudes and flimsy cardboard signs with slogans like “Smoking: The Other Deadly Sin” and “Un-Holy Smokes!” I feel like I’m part of some anti-tobacco campaign. It’s not like I’m operating an abortion clinic or a …
In my dream last night, my ex-husband had moved back into the first apartment we shared, almost ten years ago. A drafty attic-level one-bedroom. It was unchanged, down to the stains on the floors and the dents in the walls. My ex-husband was standing at the stove cooking something. His hair was falling in his …
First there was a scrabbling sound from the ceiling. Little nails scraping on wood. Ali heard it while she was breast feeding and shuddered. She reached for the phone on the ottoman without disturbing the baby and called her husband. It went straight to voicemail. She texted him: Think we’ve got a critter problem in …