The house smelled of antiseptic and aging wood, a sterile scent clinging to the memories of a home. Upstairs, the man who had raised me after my parents were gone...
The fluorescent lights of the St. Jude’s emergency room waiting area felt like interrogation lamps. Every flicker seemed to mock me, buzzing in time with the throb in my side....
We were almost ready to start our Saturday, and I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The fake smiles, the dancing, the intimacy from the night before—it all felt like acid...
I didn’t hear him. Not at first. I was just staring at the chrome on my handlebars, thinking about the price of gas and the piss-poor job the prospect did...
They dressed her in her favorite pale blue dress and placed her in a small white coffin. The doctors, with their somber faces and quiet apologies, had surrendered. Eliza, the...
The morning after they buried my husband, a soldier, I drove home to find his parents changing the locks on our front door. “Blood family only. Your time here is...
The sunlight had this perfect, hazy quality, the kind you only get in late August in Oregon. It filtered through the big maple tree in the front yard, dappling the...
The knock on the guest room door was so soft I thought I’d imagined it. It had been two days since the Incident. Two days of me staying locked in...
The sharp smell of antiseptic was a suffocating blanket, mixing with the rhythmic, mechanical beeping of the heart monitor. It was the only soundtrack to my nightmare. For two days,...
I drove without direction. The world outside the windshield was a blur of neon and rain that hadn’t started falling yet. I drove until the tidy suburbs melted into the...