Stories

Grace Churchill's daughter died for the twenty-seventh time.

Persephone Samaras can't wait to escape the oppressive heat of the pizza ovens. She's off to see her cousin Vasili in the hospital, that sterile, air-conditioned sanctuary.

Seconds after my mother died, she began work in heaven on a little play titled "Naked in Bed with Eleanor Roosevelt."

Maggie looks up. She removes the finger from her mouth. “Must be the baby,” she says. Her hand follows the curve of her belly. “She wants bugs.”

“Really? They sell crickets at pet stores. I could get some.”

Usha and I were waiting for our usual treat, a fresh, buttered, sugar-sprinkled roti each. But then our grandmother bellowed from upstairs. “Who let all the fog into my room?” demanded Ba.

“New cereal?” he asks, and then, like the path that their marriage has taken, he renders the question rhetorical with a non sequitur. “Still working on that artery project, if you can believe it.”

The back of the check reads, “You are dead already!” Of course I recognize my Marigold’s arcane, Euro-trash scrawl immediately.

The first thing is we smell smoke.

            'Annie!'

These were the drives that Stan liked best. He felt unrushed, free to go as slow as he pleased, to savor what he suspected to be the last of such journeys. In Maine, a woman waited for him and for the ring he had promised her.

Letti gasped when she saw a realtor’s lockbox on the door to the townhouse. Would her key still work?