At thirty-one weeks pregnant, I had already learned not to expect tenderness from my family. Still, I never imagined they would leave me sitting at the dinner table while my […]
Full-length version below, expanded with additional scenes to meet the floor. “Did you pick up my prescription?” I asked, cutting into the dry chicken my mother always overcooked when she […]
The Dress My first husband left me the moment he found out I was pregnant. I have told that sentence to very few people over the years, because of what […]
My brother backed his truck through my $12,000 glass sunroom because I refused to hand him the keys to my paid-off SUV for his twenty-fifth birthday. He climbed out of […]
The hardest part of any funeral is watching people who barely cared suddenly behave as though grief belongs to them. My name is Cynthia. I was twenty-nine years old when […]
The last thing I heard before the ballroom went silent was my own chair scraping across polished marble. Preston Ashworth III had one hand wrapped around the back of it. […]
For six months, the new HOA president treated my grandfather’s forty-acre Montana property like her personal beautification project. Every weekend, her white BMW idled near the iron gate my grandfather […]
I came home from work on an ordinary Tuesday evening and found my wife standing outside our own gate, holding a small grocery bag as if she had nowhere left […]
Transportation The hardest part of my father’s funeral was not the burial. I had braced for the burial. I had spent the sleepless nights before it imagining the coffin lowering […]
I built the cedar dock the summer I turned thirty, and I remember thinking, as I sank the last post into the lakebed and felt it hold, that this was […]