Skin hot, still smelling of coconut long after the sun went down, bronze and golden with youth and the certainty that nothing will change. Walking like no one was looking, but sure that everyone was mesmerized by our hips; the men driving slowly in cars, the boys on...

In the beginning, dad left and mom hung herself from the rafters.  And even though he was gone and she was gone, he was not really gone and she was not really gone. And as I bounced from home to home and school to school and family to family, he was always...

I was picking a therapist. Sue slid a chair close to mine and looked at the screen with me. “Ooh, it’s like dating,” she said. The therapists have headshots you click on. “Very funny.”  Sue had caught me pouring  bourbon into coffee.  “Really? It’s nine...

Alex, out of the hospital with his cancer diagnosis, was standing holding the IV pole with one hand and maybe questions and answers in the other. I was one of three writers and back for my second day as returning champion. My mother was sitting in a chair off to the...

Two a.m. and the wheels crunching the gravel comfort me. I sink into the pillow and savour the soothing rhythmic rolling of the stones.            Six days ago I called the cops. Again the next day. They were not...

I This part of the story should be set in Times New Roman, a typeface designed by the draftsman Victor Lardent, under the direction of the typographer Stanley Morison and named after The Times newspaper, for which it was commissioned. Matilde had never heard of...

I learned of Josh’s suicide from a comment on someone else’s post. Shane and I were in bed watching that Hitchcock film with no cuts.“What?” Shane said.“My ex killed himself.”I went outside before he could respond and called Dignan, the mutual friend I still had with...

by the way she’d twirl in that new dress with the colors of a lost sunset across the shimmering corn fields. We knew she’d become a stranger by the way she’d look right at the camera, never smiling, but her eyes danced on the molten flash, a secret slowly revealed....

The small house where I once lived and no longer visited had a fire ant problem. Instead of calling an exterminator or buying Raid like normal human beings, my progressive family decided the most viable solution was to purchase an anteater off the internet. After much...

The gingerbread house sat upon the dining room table, the only vestige of holiday cheer. Without her children for Christmas this year, Elf on the Shelf and Treetop Angel remained boxed away in the attic. Sometimes she could hear them through the air vents whispering...

In early 2020, temperatures over the Arctic spiked, and Santa Claus finally relocated to Lower Manhattan. He rented an apartment in a neighborhood he called SoHo-Ho, along with Ms. Claus and several elves, and when springtime hit, he came out onto the balcony...

When her girlfriend breaks up with her, the little necks are still alive in the fridge. For three weeks they'd failed at shucking. They must be magic, she thinks, her mind dizzy with grief, throws them into her lunch cooler on her way out....

I was standing naked and cold the night the sea took my friend Tom. While Isabelle and I were ankle deep in foamy sea water, her arms folded around me, shivering and blanketed in goose bumps, we watched Marguerite, stagger out of the waves, alone, the moon...

During college I worked at CVS with a guy named Joe who always felt like he was about to throw up. Since he was too scared to go to the doctor to get himself checked out, Joe worked each shift with a nauseous grimace plastered to his thin face, with rivulets of shiny...

He went up the embankment on the side of the road where he could see for a mile or two in every direction. The Big House smoked beyond the hill. He climbed back down and found her where he’d left her, leaning against the rusted teal Ford Taurus Station Wagon. She’ll...