Ashley fell in love like it was nothing. She liked boys with crooked smiles and long, greasy hair. But she wasn’t picky; often, a quick look was all it took to ...
I don’t like endings. I prefer to be alone when I cry, but everyone I am close with has sat near me while I wept. People divulge their secrets to me before I kn...
Click the button and the clamshell of the pocket watch opens to reveal the time like an oyster revealing its pearl. Time may be less valuable than a pearl, but ...
Cathy was working at a house for women trying to kick addictions when I met her. Her sense of humor was brash and brittle-dry. She was a native New Jerseyan in ...
Emergency personnel were called to the harbor Thursday afternoon after a man drowned while attempting to rescue a child.
He was forty, or thirty-five, or eight...
When I was eighteen, and she was sixteen, I took my sister with me to get what would be my first tattoo—her name.
I hadn’t known to research tattoo artists; ...
A 1977 divorce was trailblazing, and a custodial father was positively extraterrestrial. I was six.
A serpentine driveway tethered our farmhouse to the count...
In the Russian Taiga, the forests west of Moscow, there are places where compasses do not work. Where there is so much lead in the trees, so many bullets hidden...
Maybe it began in the cool, green darkness beneath my mother’s rhododendron. Somehow I must have sensed, even at eight years old, that what I was doing was wron...
I tried to count the blisters on my feet while you watched from the doorway. At age five, you were a year younger than me, just outside a dirty bathroom in a ho...
