The year I was born, my parents named me Elena, which means light, and they named my sister Vanessa, which means butterfly, and if you knew our family you would […]
My name is Mira, and I am thirty-five years old, and I have spent most of my adult life believing that the distance between me and my family was geographic. […]
The smell reached me before I opened the back door. That particular sweetness of decomposing plant material, hot and fermented in the July sun, the kind of smell that works […]
Ten years of marriage, and Dave chose to announce that he wanted to blow it up at a restaurant where the bread basket alone cost fourteen dollars. I want to […]
When the boy who made my life miserable in high school tracked me down a decade later and begged me to have dinner with him, I honestly thought he was […]
The leather check holder sat in the center of the table like something that had been placed there with ceremony, which in a way it had. Twelve thousand, four hundred […]
The Photograph When Dylan suggested a week at the beach with his family, some stubborn, hopeful part of me wanted to believe it might actually be fun. I should have […]
I went back home because I’d forgotten my reading glasses on the dining room table. At seventy years old, those little memory lapses have become more frequent than I’d like […]
Eric never took off his wedding ring. Not once, in twenty-two years of marriage. Not while he was under the truck with grease running down to his elbows. Not while […]
I’m sixty-four years old, and I thought I’d seen enough of life’s cruelties to be prepared for anything. I was wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened on […]