Talia grabbed my hand, tugging me toward her backyard. Her slap bracelet rubbed against my wrist like a secret code. Sarah skipped alongside, as excited as her sister, singing a song she was clearly making up. Something about the sun, surprises, and me. I was among the few on the block who could tell the…

He woke up to find he was eighty-five, but that was impossible, because he was only seven, and he had just turned fifteen, and he was thirty-one, but also fifty-two. His parents were young, and his parents were middle-aged, and his parents were aging. He was at their funeral. That was so long ago. Sometimes…

We didn’t hear the detective knock. Freddy was reading in his room. I was almost done working on a new painting in my studio, a figurative experiment, though it was getting too dark to see anything clearly. When no one answered the door, the detective walked along the side of the house and tapped on…

The first women returning to the shore found the handbag. Along the river, in a grassy hollow on the bank where they met each month, the purse went unnoticed by the women until they were just upon the spot where it huddled curiously among their towels and clothes.  The women had been out quite far…

We spent that winter underneath my thick, mothed comforter and the flannel sheets Ben’s mother gave us as a housewarming gift, sheets she hadn’t used since Ben was a child. The thermostat never eclipsed sixty-six. Each time I phoned my parents, my mother would pass the receiver to my father, and we fumbled through the…

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does it scream in agony in a language no human can understand as it teeters and crashes to the ground?  

The woman in Van Nuys has a red bucket full of roses, enough for each visitor to this crook of the strip mall. Approximately 5,200 girls go to Van Nuys each year, give or take emergencies and second opinions and holidays; Van Nuys is not open on most holidays. There are the most girls on…

This was in 1977 when I was in nursing school, eighteen years old. The whole class was outside sitting in the colored leaves under a deep blue sky. The teacher was lecturing about oxygen. I wasn’t writing anything down. I first followed the path of a shiny jet above. Then, I secretly watched Sandy Devon.…

I amuse myself by timing Cassie’s whine: thirteen minutes over the dress shoes. Everyone knows they’re meant for Sunday brunches, church services, maybe picture day at school, but she wants to wear them for riding her bike in the street.  Cassie was born the year before me and will turn twelve soon. She’s starting to…

For a few months I went out with a lawyer who used to be obsessed with his body and its shape during college. To stock up on requisite fat macros and vitamin C when in a rush, he’d crush up peaches in olive oil and drink it all down. When his grandmother caught sight of…

Spore (noun). A usually one-celled reproductive body that can grow into a new organism without uniting with another cell. The man who abducted Claire’s daughter entered the room via a doorway in the air. Though Claire only had a moment to register what was happening—they’d been mid-argument about some frilly dress her daughter had downright…

Molly begins not with a plan but an unrecognizable inkling. She loves to read. Everything. Mostly, she reads what is around the house from Reader’s Digest to John Jakes to Little Women.  And Molly loves English class. But, she thinks, everybody—every girl—loves English.  But not everybody—not every girl—is good at the harder subjects like math…