Covered My husband left on a Tuesday in October, when Jane was five years old. There was no screaming. No confession extracted through tears. No plates broken, no doors […]
Not Worth the Investment The envelopes arrived on the same afternoon in late June, both of them thin and white, both carrying the weight of the next four years. My […]
I nearly dropped my suitcase right there in Terminal B. The wheels of my carry-on caught on a crack in the tile, jolting my grip, but that wasn’t what made […]
“Your kids can eat when you get home,” my father said, flicking two cocktail napkins onto the table as though he were granting my daughters a favor. My youngest, Lily, […]
Lauren My mother tossed two sleeping bags at my children and the thing that broke in that hallway was not the sleeping arrangement. It was the last excuse I had […]
The door opened quietly, the way doors open when someone is not entirely sure they belong on the other side of them. She stepped in slowly. An elderly woman in […]
My dream wedding was only forty-eight hours away when a sharp knock at the door and the sight of a U-Haul at the curb turned my perfect future into something […]
I had imagined many versions of how I might see my son again. In some of them, he came to me alone. In some, he came in sorrow after a […]
The first thing Lori said when she met Nick was that if I didn’t marry him, she would. We were at my mother’s house for Sunday dinner, the kind of […]
Prepared literary prose rewrite within specified parameters Six weeks before my wedding, my mother called to remind me that she and my father had already told everyone they were not […]