Most everyone has heard the Ben Franklin saying that death and taxes are the only constants in life. But there’s one more. I call it the Law of the Door. If someone tells you not to open a door, you absolutely will anyway, especially if you’re thousands of dollars deep in credit card debt and […]
Alejandro clung tightly to his mother’s dress when he saw the gravedigger take the first nail out of the bag. It was large, a palm long, rusty. The man gripped the hammer and settled into the bottom of the grave pit. Alejandro’s father lay directly on the earth. He had a sunken part of his […]
There have always been jackrabbits in the neighbourhood so Michelle isn’t surprised when she comes home to two of them on her lawn, camouflaged white in the snow. What’s odd is Reginald, the Airedale, and Midge, the Wheaten Terrier, standing so silent on the other side of the living room window. Normally they’re wild at […]
The wound on his neck looks like a smile. The resemblance occurs to Darragh the moment he notices it, as he stands in the bathroom scrutinising his appearance in the mirror before school. The white collar of the shirt of his uniform does little to conceal it. Of late Darragh has often found himself examining […]
You are outside of your body, looking down at yourself on the hospital bed surrounded by family and strangers alike with smiles too eerie, too joyous, for the airlessness of the suffocating atmosphere. Next to you, Mother stands, eyes rimmed crimson, lids both above and below swollen, purple veined, pulsing, twitching, bluing lips holding back […]
It’s a dark and stormy night, and the residents of the Castle Arms apartments are watching a scary movie. On the small, bulbous screens of their television sets, a killer stalks in scratchy chiaroscuro. A detective—handsome in that bland, leading man way—is explaining to a blonde-headed reporter. “They call him the Sandman, because he strangles […]
Marion took the House Mother job the day before her twenty-fifth birthday. Not an old maid by any stretch of the imagination, but with her oatmeal-colored cardigan and sensible shoes, the honey blondes who traipsed in and out of Zeta Tau saw her as something worthy of blending in with the wallpaper. A warning of […]
We have to hold our breath inside the hospital. On the roof, I take my brother’s small hand and remind him of the rules. “Twenty breaths on the top floor. Take one less on each next one.” At his sour, puckered-lip frown, I add, “It’s good practice for counting.” In the time before we could […]
I should start by saying that I did not care for my younger sister Helen. She had been raised by my father to be loud and rude and selfish, and heedless of the feelings of others. Even so, she was my sister, and we endured each other as siblings often do. After our father abandoned […]
Sorrow I’ll tell this first part of the tale as you told me, dear brother, since you can’t bear to tell it anymore. Not even to yourself. I want you to understand how things came to this pass. Brian Coin, that black-haired boy like a rail-thin raven, saw him too, you know, walking through the […]
