They said the house was built too close to the sea—that every tide tried to take it back. From the lane, it looked half-forgotten: roof bowed, shutters blind, its lone chimney still breathing salt into the air. When I arrived, the front gate was already open, as though it had been expecting me. The brass sign beside it read THE…
I. The Job There was the sound. It’s always mistaken for something else—a backfiring car, Roman candles. When I hear gunfire, I think of those countries on television: crowds packing a two-tone bazaar, shawled women, kids waving at the camera. Somewhere, a machine gun rattles. A bomb goes off. No one flinches. But here in America, we want to hear…
It began with the drapes. One day, while dusting the living room, Suzanne Spencer noticed a small thread escaping from the weave of the fabric. She pulled at it until it broke free. Instead of rolling it up between her thumb and finger, she took the thread, lifted it to her mouth, and swallowed it. Then, she continued the dusting,…
Jane Fonda says addicts don’t get married to people who pay attention, but I don’t think Mike and I were addicts. Anyway, not that I noticed right away. Sure, he’d be drinking pepper vodka by noon on Tuesday, and there was nothing I didn’t owe. Were we self-deluded? We had our strategies of denial and avoidance, like everyone else. I…
You are dying. You have known you are dying for some time now. You have known, really, since before the test you took at the free clinic came back positive. Even the times before, when it came back negative, somehow you knew it would get you eventually. The dramatic irony was just too much to resist. This was always going…
John had always imagined his daughter would one day turn out just like him. He was wrong. In fact, June was nothing like her mother Maggie, either. It was as if she’d been dropped off by a stork, a stork working for Jesus. Of all their dissimilarities, her love of Jesus was the weirdest. They’d never gone to church as…
Cal didn’t know why he kept checking his phone. He was in the red. He knew that. Seventeen percent. He still had service for a little while. He would find a way to charge it. Soon. The percentage hadn’t changed in the last several minutes, and he told himself that was the last time he would check it. When he…
Drifting up to the bare light bulb overhead, Judy watches herself below on the concrete basement floor, her petite Peter Pan self with short blond hair and a nose that Jack describes as either “perky” or “pointed,” depending on his mood and hers. Peter Pan with crow’s feet. Is this truly her marriage, she wonders, her life? Pages drop from…
I watch Vin ride his windrower slowly through the green hayfield in the early evening. Three pronghorn stand in the long grass, chewing the harvest, but Vin doesn’t seem to mind. The animals, with their tan and white coats and inward-curved horns, belong to an ancient species and look like they’d be more at home on the Serengeti. Mammatus clouds…