(Content Note for use of racist slur.) John Wood boarded the Gracie-Ella ahead of the crew. He carried his sea chest on his shoulder. In a satchel slung low on his hip were his tools and the three things most precious to him: a lock of his grandmother’s hair, a shaving from the first cabinet […]
The Mother that Made Me. Cold and wet and smacked with air. I scream until I feel a familiar heartbeat. Smell of milk, and beyond that, the smell of lavender. Blooming in fields that stretch to touch the horizon. Home. Safe. Warm. Warm like the burning sun in the burning sky. The New Boy Who […]
Everything started here: A broad plain of yellow grass, the stalks crushed and smeared with blood, and the sounds of dying men—yes, all men—sobbing and praying to the rusty pink sky. The high grass hid their forms and faces. They were bodiless voices, as if ghosts already, rising above the field like ashes to heaven. […]
Ordinary fathers lead ordinary lives. They go to work, they raise the kid, they open their homes for the weekly mahjong and meal that rotates from one family to the next in their circle of Chinese immigrants. When they text their daughters, the cell phone vibrates discreetly. If the phone is buried in a backpack, […]
After the memorial service, Phoebe Morris returned to the beachfront townhouse where her mother had lived for the last twenty years, and prepared to cope. There was nothing of Mother’s that she particularly wanted, but there were papers to sort and clothing to donate, and it was her responsibility. She was an only child, an […]
I found my dying boy curled up in a pile of straw wet with his blood. Seamus rolled over as I entered the barn, and I saw then that he’d chewed his fingers down to the first knuckle. I gasped. “I can taste my King in my wet,” he said, rocking forward, naming his lost […]
The lakeside painter is lying, but no one seems to care. It’s a beautiful lie, even Elodie will admit that. There are two lovers on the pier with the painter, sitting for their portrait, and she’s honest about the way the light of the setting sun catches their hair, the way the breeze ripples their […]
His condition was quickly deteriorating and thus it was deemed best that he journey to Saltwater House. The ocean air, the murmur of the waves, they would soothe him. Balthazar had a fortune and a name. Judith had neither. Her father had been a friend to Balthazar’s father. She was now an orphan, though she […]
The Masters file into the high-vaulted chamber with its ceiling of clear, faceted crystal. The rainbow light cast by the sun finds its echo in their robes, fine silks in all the shades of their titles: sky-blue, steel-grey, rose-red, blood-red. The thrones upon which they seat themselves are carved from impossibly large blocks of the […]
You are two on the day you see your first personal bird. It is the sort of thing you barely remember later, at six, seven, twenty. And yet you cling to it as your first memory: a sleek black penguin waddling through your nursery, it in black, you in white lace, mended and re-mended because […]