How long had we been staring at her tiny body? Twenty seconds? Twenty minutes? She was doing her magic trick: breathing in through her...

Once Stu decides to leave, that’s it (except not really, no, not at all).  He moves into action at once (or, at least, he tells himself...

“How did you come to know Catherine Cormier?” “Kitty? We both lived at The Harris.” “The Hotel Harris, downtown?” “Yes, that’s right.”...

I’m eleven. Kneeling beside my bed, hands clasped. “Uncle Brendan? Are you up there? Sister Claire says now that you’re in heaven you...

She looks spent. The coldness of the light has saturated her skin and her eyes and even her hair. They look dull and flat and hard like...

“Let me just send this one email,” Derek says, his eyes already on the phone, thumbs flying across the screen. He’s not expecting me to...

I just read the beginning of a restaurant review in which the writer said the one thing chefs have in common is a mother who can cook, so...

Everyone said the sniff was to blame for Rob going off the rails. They thought it was why he stopped hitting his sales targets. Ruben...

On a breathless night in Malta, light fragmented by bedroom shutters pries Maria’s eyes open. She leaves her empty bed. The church bells...

I’ve figured out that if I run the bath for 10 minutes on full heat and two minutes ice-cold, the water in my clawfoot tub will reach the...

Dzung Life sure is trippy sometimes. Take today. I’m sittin’ in a brand new ’75 Chevy Impala across from my dad. Two weeks ago, he was a...

5 pm. Flight canceled, a fourteen-hour layover. Ernest sits in a vinyl seat, a little girl wriggling on the seat behind him, and calls...

I don’t exactly know where my dreams end and my memories begin, but I’m pretty sure that most of this is true. The summer I turned five....

There were plans for a party at Ava’s place to celebrate the moment when the continents would converge, when land would finally touch...

There’s nothing I’m more sick of than the reliable tick of my grandmother’s grandfather clock, standing watch as it does over a living...

I’ll never forget his face, wide open to the harsh light of the screen, drinkin’ it all in. At’s why it happened, Da said. He was all...

Lori Martin was careful never to mix up her textbooks with her client book, which by the end of term was almost full. It was hard to...

Trixie had been writing for 10 years before she finally got published. It was a long slog, with dozens and dozens of bad short stories, a...

If I ever have a wife, there’s no way I’ll buy another hunting jacket over fixing the leaky toilet and the broken backdoor lock and if I...

Every so often – such a vague beginning I know but stick with me – every so often Marty calls me on the telephone, always the same wet...