The Archivist

I stop at the same restaurant most nights, and I have for two years, and I have never once examined why. The honest answer, if I am being honest, is […]

My grandmother’s hands shook in the last year of her life, but her mind never did. I want to say that first, before anything else, because the story I am […]

The twenty-one-gun salute had finished echoing across the Virginia hills when Mr. Halloway cleared his throat and read my name. I had been watching the flag ceremony from the window […]

The winter light through the bedroom blinds had that particular flat quality it gets in January, the color of something that has given up trying to be warm. I had […]

The baby I lost that Thursday weighed eight hundred and forty grams. She had been with us for eleven days, which in the NICU is both a very long time […]

I bought my house with forty years of other people’s floors. That is not a metaphor. I was a housekeeper for four decades, moving through the rooms of families who […]

She said it standing in my kitchen, eating the lasagna I had spent half the afternoon making, drinking the wine I had opened for us, while her three children thundered […]

Aitana The footsteps stopped just outside the entrance. They were not the careless footsteps of someone wandering off a trail or stumbling through unfamiliar ground. They were slow and deliberate, […]

For the Record A court reporter in Charleston. Six years of other people’s testimony. And the night her own hands finally stopped typing for someone else. Iknow the exact time […]

Aveline The apartment I lived in before all of this had creaky floors and a radiator that knocked when the temperature dropped. My kitchen window looked out toward the Androscoggin […]