Stories

This year, in fact, he had made a list of eligible women and he would begin (after August vacation) to interview them, as it were.

"Butter is too bold," Caroline announced, tossing the sheet of color samples to the floor. "In fact, this entire strip is too loud." 

The summer my father left us, our front yard was filled with deep, grave-sized pits.

The ice cream truck drives by every night around 10:15. Like an old tire, the music sounds like it could deflate and go out of tune at any moment.

Two hours after reporting to operating room nine, Drew stood, gowned, gloved and angry, across the table from Dr. Owen Bates. Patients and the medical board called him Dr. Bates, but everyone else called him the Old Bastard, or OB for short.

The cat meows. I like to imagine she was once gainfully employed in the cat world, as a college professor or a medical doctor. When she fell on hard times, she became depressed, and rightfully so.

Two weekends after Myra’s old neighbors vacated the trailer next to hers, this man and his bony brown Lab pulled in with all his furniture tied down in the bed of his pickup.

I had arrived to the hospital in labor, and waddled into the emergency room like I was about to claim a lottery prize. Instead, I got Claudia in my room. My baby Liam died before I delivered him.

My brother killed himself one Saturday morning, just to spite my mother.

At thirty-six she has never had a man fall asleep with his head on her shoulder. She has never been touched before. Not like that. Not by a man. Or a woman.