She had been seeing her therapist for almost seven months before she mentioned the photograph, and even then she brought it up incidentally like it was no big deal. Here’s how she remembers it: At the bottom of the garden in the house she grew up in was a small shed in which her…
The sun came in the windows midmorning—about 10am in summer—and then by midday it was overhead, leaking light down on that solitary house in the valley, making the surface tension on the dewdrops break and flow into pools of damp. You didn’t know if it was better to keep the lights on during the…
My mother had convinced herself—and us—that the landlord would never go through with it. But the eviction notice said the marshal would arrive at seven in the morning, and he did. She tried stopping him with lies. “Mr. Levine said he’ll wait for the rent,” she insisted. “He told me himself. I spoke to…
Tomorrow they will pull down the old fire station drill tower. Structural problems — they say. It’s not safe to pitch a ladder against it anymore. We were instructed to start practising our hoselines against the station wall after a portion of the roof caved in two summers ago. But word of the…
-1- One week after the fire claimed her grown son and English setter, her horses and wagons, her rifles and ledgers, her personal library, her precisely calibrated lab instruments and voluminous notebooks in which she’d recorded her secret chemical formulae, Hilda Whitby stood with her back to the riverbank and surveyed for a…
Damn. Sotto voce of the mistake he considers he’s made. Damn. Louder… as, once more, he scans the beach. Which is empty, utterly emp— Except now, with his curse and a slight pivot of his position, it isn’t… empty, at all. A figure… a guy… a youngish guy… is crossing, and coming down, the…
I saw Ann the other day. I was walking down Granville Street, and I could smell the sea, that wild pungent smell that always grabs me. It had been raining, and the air was damp as only Vancouver air can be. I was on the side of the street where Hudson’s Bay still stands,…
I am trying at a bird. It won’t come out very well because I haven’t been painting long, but it’s soothing nonetheless and fills my time. Yesterday was the flower garden. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted either, but I’m determined to improve. The flower garden is just outside the window. The…
You’re watching a woman rob you. Your purse hangs under the bar on a peg, not even a foot away. The woman digging through your belongings isn’t discreet, but nobody stops her. That doesn’t happen in this kind of place. This lounge is underground—under O’Malley’s with its dark windows and neon glaze of bar…
That was the year I turned seventeen, and Mother started to rail on me a lot for the way I looked and the way I dressed. And Dad wasn’t there any more to defend me or just say “stop it.” “Chilton Ford!” My toes were already curling inside of my old sneakers. “You know…
I moved to Portland, Oregon to get away from the East Coast. No more rat race. No demoralizing commutes. No snowy winters. I wanted to spend time in a city where there were things to do outside, where a typical week didn’t exclusively involve working your ass off Monday to Friday, then meeting up…
“We have only a little time to please the living, but all eternity to love the dead.” –Sophocles He insisted on ordering squid, or whatever that nice word is they use so you don’t know you’re ordering squid, even though she said she had tried it before and didn’t like it. Not as fresh…
“They called her the Tenth Muse.” “What’s a muse?” “Um. Well, it’s a goddess who inspires writers, artists, dancers, poets—you know, that sort of thing. The inspired people were almost all male, of course. I supposed they liked the idea of female assistance.” “But she wasn’t a goddess, was she?” “No. And not really…
Dolores wanted to name her Joy, but he wouldn’t have it. He said Joy wasn’t a name; it was an emotion. She said that was exactly the point. She wanted to mark her daughter the same way her mother had marked her, but not to wallow, disheartened and overwhelmed, but to bubble rapidly, burst…
It’s a hard-won thing, this vacation, a treat that Christine and Marc put on their bucket list for retirement. Carrying it out has proved tricky. Here they are, in Tuscany, where Marc has long wanted to spend a month in an Italian villa. They have rented it with housekeeping, the easier to host their…
Helen wakes at night and complains that there is something in her hair. To begin with, my word that there is nothing there is sufficient to reassure her. But, over time, she has grown convinced. Typically, she wakes at 3 or 4 am. She pulls at her hair and scratches her scalp. ‘Helen, please…
It was a Sunday, early evening, spring. New leaves shining in the trees along both sides of MacLellan Street forming a vivid, protective canopy. A current of regulated security glittering in the air, in the ordered rows of parked cars, the sheen of cleaned windows. Clayton Beale, his mind alert, his hands trembling, stood…
She postponed looking at her grandmother till last, dwelling on all that surrounded the coffin, all that was familiar to her: a polished harmonium smelling of sawdust; a Bible, the edge of its closed pages broad-brushed in gold; twenty-five black-bordered cards of condolence; a vase of chrysanthemums, and a thrusting Amaryllis in a world…
After Jack had left the blue house in Enterprise Hills, taking along with him the organic cotton sheets on which they had so often slept together and the expensive French press that had been an un-wedding gift from friends, Allie had breathing room. For the first time in months that felt like years, she…
The fluorescents disclose the silver in James’ slick hair. When they flicker out, we’re left in the bluish light of evening. “So, do you like college?” He chops a red bell pepper. I take a sip of my coffee and nod, my hands molded around the white ceramic. I don’t know how he knows…
No one is home. The ceiling fan still turns in the living room of this flat in western Kuala Lumpur, but otherwise nothing stirs. When Tatsuya Segawa gets back from the office tonight, he will once again find the place a shambles. Every toy Minoru owns, and every household item Aoi has pressed into…
The letter lay unopened on the kitchen table for nearly a week before the old man finally succumbed to his curiosity. It had been tucked innocently between the telephone bill and an ad pamphlet, marked with a decorative floral stamp and neatly hand-addressed—only not to him. His home’s address was indeed written below the…
The white Volkswagen Jetta veered onto a pebbled road. It snaked through a dense forest and in the darkness Jon couldn’t make out any street signs or markers. Only when the car had already turned into the driveway did the headlights illuminate a stone pillar that read Abbott, and he was thankful that Margot…
Max’s barking roused him from his black-coffee reverie, staring at its smooth steaming surface, waiting for it to cool, reflecting on Clara’s failing memory even though she was hardly an old woman, two years his junior, in fact—a point she enjoyed ribbing him about, especially on his birthdays. The sound rolled on the wind,…
Julia swirled her glass of pinot noir. The dim lighting in the bar flattered Sam’s angular face and blondish hair. Julia took a sip and pushed the gold-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose. Sam stirred his straw in his old fashioned, now a glass of khaki-colored ice and a cherry stem. A…
Try as he might, he could not recall Brian Geist. After all, nearly forty years had passed, and no shred of memory, not the slightest personal detail, survived. When Bo was a boy, his family had hosted American students through various exchange programs. Geist claimed to have stayed with them for only a couple…
Phoebe stood at the edge of the highway, looking left, then right. It was just past dawn. Nothing up yet but a pack of coyotes, trotting loose limbed on the other side of a barbed wire fence, nose to ground on a hunt. One glanced at Phoebe, turned away and followed the others along…
The front window of the coffee shop explodes outwards as the bomb goes off. I see it clear as anything. It kills the young mother and her baby in the pram first, then it rips through the homeless man, bundled up in charity blankets on the other side of the path. The blast tears…
“M-U-E-R-T-E,” he spelled out in the boy’s second language so that he couldn’t understand that there was death in the room with them. It was his parents’ language, the one that contained words he understood but could not yet spell out. Being that her eyes were swelling with grief, the woman tried desperately not…
THE IM/IM PODCAST 1. – Arthur Havens? – On the line. – Pardon me. He’s on another line? – Sorry. It’s what my father always said. You know, when the call was for him and he answered it. What do you say? – When? – When you pick up and somebody says your name…
On the drive out to the cabin, Jeff and Miranda barely spoke. It was the first time she’d been to Minnesota. They had planned the trip during a happier time, when the suggestion of meeting his family had sounded like a promise. The air conditioner in the rental car was barely working. Miranda…
27th November 1781 Today I scrubbed my hands clean until they were red and swollen with anguish and small dots of red blood prickled across my knuckles. It gave me no pleasure to do so, but for a few moments, those few short moments before my nerve endings prickled in alarm, I felt…
‘Aren’t you getting a little old for this?’ said Elizaveta Entina as she walked past Tatyana Smekhova into Tatyana Smekhova’s flat. Smekhova looked out onto the landing for a moment. No one else was there and, despite her haughty demeanour, inside herself she was relieved. She closed the flat’s outer door and pushed the…
Upon entering the bathroom of the bank, the third man yanked off his rubber Trump mask. Now that Jules finally could see his face, he realized that the man was, in fact, just a boy, seventeen, eighteen at most. Fear filled his watery eyes, obvious even in the reflection of the mirror across from…
At sixteen, I was exactly half the age of Brian. My best friend, Laura, said, “He’s a whole lot cuter than any of the guys at school, Shelby.” “That’s my dad!” Other friends made similar comments, but none of them ever did anything about it—not like Laura. On our visits to his messy-as-a-dorm-room efficiency…
She arrives a few minutes late for the appointment, hoping to appear fashionable, as if delayed by a function, but having used the extra time to subdue her anxiety. Surely, others have perpetrated this lie, pretended the affluence that could afford such a home just to get a look. She can’t help wondering how…
Anna woke at 4:00, the numbers wide-eyed on the little travel clock, and after half an hour or so slept again. It was quiet by then, and the heat had broken—though not her own, not yet. She woke not knowing who she was, with the strange slatted light on the strange wall, one of…
I sit down at my desk to write a letter to Rome, the city of love and the death of love and love that dies trying to be born. I think of Piazza Vittorio, on the Esquiline Hill. The four plaza walls are made of apartments built during the Risorgimento, the period after Garibaldi…
Jill and I are only friends for one reason. I think we’ve both always known. We weren’t even ever really friends, just drawn together by our mutual love for Causby, and our need to keep it alive. Jill is his ex-girlfriend; I’m his best friend’s little sister. Her chance with him is over, and…
“Bert,” said Molly from across the open floor, “shoes over here.” The thrift shop was really just an old three story home, shabby and dimly lit, converted years prior to sell useless throwaways. She uncaringly turned and waddled on, curbing her right hand around the bump on her abdomen as she went….
In the morning Webby was gone. The Sofa was empty, all the cushions piled up for a pillow, the blanket that Molly had given him half on the floor. The telephone was in the middle of the room, the cord pulled tight like a trip wire. Barbara put it back where it was supposed to…
This is what happens the night Eames’s sister comes back to town. Cue Bucky over by the pinball machines with a horde of friends watching him, two or three guys sucking on sodas and hanging over his shoulders. Two or three guys isn’t really a horde, but Bucky has a way of making it…
Rick’s cell phone rang while he was at work. He should have let it go to voicemail, and would have, had he not looked and saw it was Linda. “Hi,” he said, not without some trepidation. She was crying. “Linda, what’s wrong?” It took a moment for her to speak. “She’s…she’s dead,” Linda said…
The keystone of my admiration of Vernon was his understanding that to some, if the stakes are high enough, a tiny imperfection is intolerable. I met him at a racket club I joined after getting back from Germany, and we liked each other right away. We had a lot in common. A couple of…
Joanie circled the cul-de-sac and pulled in behind the moving truck. She cut the engine, and the wagon rattled quiet. She sat a moment in silence, looking at his progress so far. Their furniture was on the lawn, in the exact setup of the living room. The plaid couch faced the street, bookended by…
“Should we be here?” she asked. “Why not?” he said. “We’ve as much right as any.” “But they’re locking up,” she said. “I can hear them. I can hear their keys.” “Good!” he said. “What do you mean ‘Good’?” she said. “Let them!” he said. “But how will we get home?” she asked. “In…
I woke from a deep sleep and lay on my back for a good minute, looking through the window at the autumn sky, which was clear after a week of rain. Then suddenly I had this strange feeling. You were lying next to me, very still. For a second I panicked. Then I remembered…
It was starting to become a thing, my going up to the wrong person. I would go up to a guest, for example, thinking it was one of my parents, and only when the person responded would I realize that it wasn’t one of my parents. It had happened four times in the past…
ONE Lily’s in the window-seat in pyjamas, legs tucked under, the grubby soles of her feet showing. She offers the wraith of a smile. When Aidan stoops to kiss her, Lily puts up her mouth and passively accepts his early-morning kiss. Aidan takes note. Lily’s moods govern the atmosphere in the household;…
What to wear? I had gone to bed to escape the question, and more serious ones, too. When I woke—too early, nervous, excited—I had to smile. Worrying about my clothes? Apart from my street-bought J’Aime Paris sweatshirt and old gray sweatpants I had only two options, the purple dress and the black, neither what…
The December afternoon had closed in. It was dark already. As she trailed him up the short path, she glanced at the miniature Christmas tree glittering in the bay window. Darren reached out, pressed the doorbell. ‘It’s a very desirable area, this,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Don’t stay on the market long.’…
— Oh hi, how are you? — I’m good, thank you. How are you? — How’s the job? — It’s great, actually. — Well that’s … that’s the diplomatic thing to say. — No it’s good – I mean, it’s working out good. — About cleaning toilets! — I guess you could say that,…
I started working at Shivers ice cream shop in April, midway through my last semester at community college and just before I was set to transfer to a university halfway across the country. I’d finally gotten my crap together and lived up to the academic potential that had always eluded me. I’m not sure…
In the hollow of her hands was a dead baby bird. Its tiny wings tucked in and its head pulled back, beak open. Black spaces for eyes, its body a scaly grey and pink dotted with vivid blue feathers. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, a look of gentle concentration on…
I pour the milk into the bowl and whisk it into the beaten eggs, and then add the flour slowly so as not to create lumps. The batter must be smooth and glossy as the inside of the conch shell that sits on my nightstand. I’m getting ready to add baking powder when I hear…
“Oh, oh! Those schoolgirl knees! But, ech! the filthy whore… Fire, Fire! Capuchins! Coco Coco! Fascist fire in the gutters!” The puke-green digits on my little clock-radio declared it was, once again, the dark night of the soul. How does that withered thorax generate so many decibels? Fire! The word shattered my sleep. For…
The Universal Key My father collected keys. He’d always collected keys, from childhood. He had thousands. Maybe more – tens of thousands. But of course the one key that he was looking for had always eluded his grasp. His collection was never complete. There were some keys – important collectors’ keys – that…
I’m a Midwestern girl, born and raised in Zionsville, a suburb of Indianapolis. I’m still in Indiana, working on a master’s degree at IU’s Jacobs School of Music. I was an undergraduate at the University too, with a double major in Music and French. I’m like a lot of my kind—that is, highly educated…
When Philippe summoned me to his office, I figured I was in hot water over my last feature. Perhaps the Minister of Education had complained about my choice of adjectives or, worse, turned up some inaccuracy. I grabbed my notes. “No, no complaints from on high,” said Philippe. “Not yet, at least. No, I’ve…
Call it what you will – Fate, luck, happenstance, stupidity. It doesn’t matter. I had been feeling a bit edgy for quite a while. So, when someone assaulting me on a bus suggested, between landing a series of painful blows to my head, that I should get some therapy, I decided that perhaps, after all…
I waved across the college car park as my classmates got into their cars and drove away. A few offered me a lift, but I had already called a taxi. It was just after nine. The sun had been down for four hours already and a light rain was starting to harden into fine…
I met Michelle on a new dating app whose CEO had recently migrated from a company that provided $99 pie graphs of their customers’ ancestral origins in exchange for vials of saliva mailed to their Salt Lake City lab. The Mormons had always been interested in identifying their pre-Mormon ancestors for posthumous baptism. I…
I’d had no contact with my ex-husband Erwin for years, nor was I curious to find out what he was up to. But when an email from his wife arrived announcing his death, I was sent scrabbling around in my file cabinet in search of a stray newspaper clipping or photo to console her…
