The Archivist

She looked at me for a long moment, her face doing the complicated thing it had been doing for months now, sorting through feelings that didn’t have clean names. Then […]

She was young, and for the first time in her life, she discovered how easy it is to be made into someone you are not when the people around you […]

Most people think betrayal announces itself with noise. A scream. A confession. A slammed door that rattles the family photos. I used to believe that too. The night my marriage […]

Favor the Brave The scanner chirped once. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just one clean electronic note cutting across the smell of burnt coffee and powdered eggs and the wet hiss […]

The thing inside the rabbit’s ear was a tracking tag. I know that now because Denise Harlan cut the seam open with the tiny folding scissors she kept on her […]

The River-Shaped Crack The city bus shuddered over a pothole, and I tightened my grip on the canvas bag in my lap. It was a reflex, the instinct to protect […]

The House on Maple Street My father slid the contract across the heavy oak dining table as if he were offering me a generous compromise rather than an ultimatum. The […]

The morning Brittany left for Napa started like every other morning in the six years since the accident, which is to say it started with the particular careful choreography our […]

Andrea’s people cut the grate, broke the lock, and opened the basement door, and I went down the stairs before anyone told me I could. The concrete steps were uneven […]

My mother’s yellow cardigan still hung on the hook behind the pantry door. Eleven months after the cancer took her, neither my father nor I had moved it. It had […]