It was David who brought it up. “So your boyfriend made a movie,” he hollered at me out the car window. David is my husband. Eighteen...

I stole a lot of things when I was 13 and 14. My family lived in Virginia Beach then. My father, who’d been an enlisted man in the U.S....

Early on, when food remains on ransacked shelves and you can find still-crisp apples rolled into dusty shadows and your mouth fills with...

A man squeezes into the middle seat beside me. ‘Could they make these seats any smaller?’ he puffs. I don’t answer, pressing my face...

I was skin and bone my mother said and she was right, I was Grapes of Wrath skinny, but I  guess Mr. Smalley understood hunger, its...

The dog settles herself in the front seat, her head on the armrest, dozing. You flick through the radio stations until you find something...

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...