Her over the road’s got a fancy man. He’s got a face like a bulldog lickin’ pish off a thistle, but he’s got a BMW, so she’s happy enough. He’s there now, washing the car. She’s in a deckchair, filing her nails, fake-tanned legs crossed, one bouncing up and down so her sparkly gold sandal …
Truth be told, though it was Eric’s doing, it was hardly his fault. It was she, after all, who was late for her ‘August 22 @ 11:00am’ interview, retreating with a watery glare when the receptionist ignored her wheedling. Stomping dejectedly into the street, she slammed into Eric in a silky-smooth blur. When he straightened …
The morning after my husband announced he didn’t think he loved me, I woke to the squawking of gulls and terns, which was strange since we didn’t live at the shore. When I slid out of bed, the floor tilted at an odd angle and I braced myself against the bed to keep from sliding …
There’s a gap in my memory of that morning, and it ends in front of our house not long after sunrise. I have no recollection of being on the 486 bus, nor do I remember walking from the bus stop to our road. Sometimes I wonder if I took a cab, which would make sense, …
I sob convincingly into her shoulder. She’s so sorry. She feels responsible. She can’t believe he’d do this. Except she does believe it. Of course she does. Why would I lie? They had started out as a casual, no-strings-attached thing, but now every few days I end up painstakingly picking through the tangle she’s got …
The care home has a sound. The disembodied chatter of TV gameshow hosts, a distant timpani of plates and cutlery, the tectonic rumble of industrial washing machines. The residents themselves speak in broken syntax, haunted parentheses. Mouths yawning, forgetful. Yulya starts her shift at seven. By the time she gets her first break at noon …
Perhaps she knew something they didn’t. The girl, who danced in the castle grounds, who flitted through the gardens with the breeze, far too light to touch the grass that should have crunched beneath her feet. It was possible she didn’t exist at all, this girl. The servants who had lived within the castle walls …
When I was little, I wondered how something as dainty as a radio could fit so many people inside it. How all the owners of those droning voices could come from a thing the size of a toaster. A whole tiny town’s worth trapped inside, each person pressing themselves against the grill of the speaker …
When my loom band hobby becomes obsession Mum renames me. Take it as a compliment, she says, it’s a cool tune. Don’t say cool, Mother, I say, resolving never to listen to said tune. But someday I will. Although only ten, I know this. Generation Zedders are pathologically inquisitive, you see. Ignorance makes us twitch. …
In the canyonlands, you can always see it coming. At twelve noon on this green mesa, it came. * She got a bus to the stretch-baked, red-eyed desert. A truck stop, a Mickey D’s. The rusting plant of steel tanks and smokestacks was backed by nothing, a lawless city in a dead-horse land. He was …
The letter is short, precise, almost clinical. My impulse is to screw it up, throw it away, burn it. It seems cruel to offer this blunt statement: now you’re dead. What am I supposed to do with it? I can’t refuse it, hurt you and feel avenged. I can’t accept it and forgive you. I …
He climbs the ladders into the mouth of the attic, flicking the switch for the light he installed one lukewarm summer, some years ago. Back then, he held the intention of turning the attic into a space for his daughter to play with Barbies and plush bears. He made countless promises to his wife that …