Ghost Parachute

Her body was covered in holes, as if her flesh had been munched on by earthworms. They were spread around her with the symmetry of a machine-made pattern, but sometimes they twisted around the bends of her face and disfigured it. The constant exposure to honey had loosened her skin so much it resembled a […]

My introduction to cruelty came from the boy who lived across the street. He shouted to me from his side yard, and I followed him to a patch of dirt freshly planted with petunias. Their velvety purple flounces drew my eye to the core of darkness at the bud. Some petals were ripped, disturbing the […]

MAIN ENTRANCE Under the big top the tightrope act is introduced, and he knows the show is almost over. In an hour he’ll be drunk, shoveling elephant shit and carcass scraps that the big cats leave behind. The smells cling to him: days-old sewage, bodies that haven’t showered in a week, the singed wick of […]

Jade dug around in and tossed aside items from the pile of stuff she kept on the vanity we’d purchased for the bedroom when she moved in. “What if I’d known you first?” I asked. “I don’t know, Josh.” She found her passport and tossed a bag over her shoulder, returned to the vanity and […]

In those years, their meeting place was a clearing in the woods behind their neighborhood. A house had stood in the clearing once, but all that was left now was the brick fireplace and a few chunks of foundation poking through the mossy ground. As the three of them lingered into the evenings, the air […]

Hester’s Mom expected only a scattering of the dead girl’s relatives in an empty church, so by the time she found parking at the library, hurried up the hill and the stone steps in her wobbly stilettos, and claimed a spot among the late-comers crowded at the back, her daughter was already at the podium, […]