The Archivist

“They were going to be mine someday anyway, Mom.” My son said that to me in my own yard at dusk on a Friday, with his hands shoved in his […]

“Two dollars,” my sister said. “Any duck on the table. Two dollars.” She was saying it to a man in a seed corn cap who had one of Dad’s mallard […]

The grass told me before anybody else did. I came home from work on a Monday with a sack of groceries on my hip, and there was a long yellow […]

The shelves were bare. I stood at the bottom of Mama’s cellar steps with my hand still on the light string and looked at them, all five rows, floor to […]

The saddle rack in Dad’s shed was empty, and for a second I honestly thought I had walked into the wrong shed. I was forty-four years old, standing in the […]

There were four dents in the carpet where the cabinet had stood. That’s what I saw first. Four little square dents, each one about the size of a postage stamp, […]

There were forty pale rectangles in the grass where our hives had been, and I counted every one of them. I don’t know why. I could see from the lane […]

My name is Harleen Eekens, and I am seventy-one years old. On a Saturday night in September, I told my daughter-in-law I had an early flight, and I went to […]

Someone kept ruining my freshly painted garage door just days before our neighborhood’s biggest competition. When I found out who was behind it, I decided to give the judges a […]

The double doors at the back of the gym hit the wall with a bang that made half the room jump. My son was in the middle of the second […]