How Things Last Part One: Two Envelopes My husband was careful with money his whole life. Thomas Whitford was a hardware store owner from a small town in North Carolina […]
I heard Martin laugh before I saw him. It’s a big laugh. It starts low and goes up at the end, like a car shifting gears. I’ve known that laugh […]
Seventy-Two Hours Part One: The Driveway My brother-in-law threw me out of my own lake house three days before I was due back on active duty. He called me a […]
Below the Frost Line Part One: The Coffee Can My grandson called me at twenty minutes to four on a Monday afternoon in late September, and the first thing he […]
The Red Dress Part One: Just the Two of Us For the first twelve years of my life, it was just my mother and me. We lived in a small […]
His porch light was on. That was the first wrong thing. Horace Pickett never left his porch light on. Not once in eleven years. He said electricity cost money and […]
The man in the black coat stopped in the doorway of the dining hall and looked around the room. He was tall. Maybe fifty. Dark suit, long black wool coat, […]
He came across that courtyard like I’d broken into his house. I was standing outside the registration tent at a university in Washington, D.C. It was a Saturday morning in […]
The stranger set the box down between my red carnations and my untouched coffee. It was small and blue. The cardboard kind, with a lid that fits over the top. […]
The crow dropped my daughter’s hair clip at my feet three hours after she disappeared. It was a little pink plastic butterfly. The kind they sell in packs of twelve […]