It started with a scratching noise, the kind that makes you think of rats or maybe a trapped bird. But then came the thumps, heavy and deliberate, like something pacing above us. My father, never one for superstition, climbed the ladder one night with a flashlight in one hand and a cigarette in the other.…

He’s twenty feet tall, easy. People say ogres don’t grow that tall, but people don’t know. He also wears glasses and calls them spectacles like he’s forgotten what century it is. His house is a converted silo next to an abandoned barn on a former cattle ranch. The cattle are long gone and were delicious.…

The teen disco was on Chestnut Street, the part of downtown that sold 10k gold doorknocker earrings and Fila sweatsuits. The mannequins in the women’s clothing store windows wore pastel polyester suits, much like the one I wore that Easter Sunday. Mama told me the cuff on the wide leg pants was fashionable, but the…

Alone in the rectory, on his cot at night, while the sugar maple groaned and a branch struck his window—there, he nursed a private fear. That if he fell in the shower or passed in the night, no one would find him for days.  Maybe all those years ago, the priest wasn’t scared of a…

The novel you are writing is set on the island of Grosse Ile, which is nestled on the Detroit River at the mouth of Lake Erie, between Michigan and Canada. The island is slightly more than nine square miles in area.

When Cain spoke to his brother Abel in the field, of what did he speak? Did he speak of the fruit that he had brought forth from the ground and then offered to the Lord? Did he speak of its bountifulness, its succulence? Did he speak, too, of his brother’s own offering, the firstlings and…

My grandmother returns from the dead on Tuesdays. Not every Tuesday—I’m not that lucky—but often enough that I’ve learned to bake her shortbread cookies on Monday nights, just in case. She materializes at 10:17 a.m., wearing the blue dress she was buried in, smelling of cloves and the embalming fluid that Mr. Henshaw at Eternal…

I woke up to my roommate Gary shouting, “Fire in the hole!” I opened my eyes just as he tossed  one of last night’s Busch Light cans like a hand grenade. The empty can ricocheted off the window above my bed before smacking me in the forehead. Gary retrieved another crumpled can from his sweatpants…

See this old house atop the steep, steep hill? This is where I lived when I ran away from you, when I was long-haired and vixen-minded.  I haven’t changed.  This is where I mowed the lawn, the only one of the six roommates who had ever mowed a lawn before. You taught me how, when…

If they don’t stop growing up so fast, I will be forced to freeze time. For everyone else, the world will stop and it will be 11:42 on Sunday morning. Mrs. Sorrento will forever be gliding back into her driveway after returning from Mass. Her son will be leaning out of the rear window, shouting…

Dear Mr. Roth, Thank you for your recent submission of the manuscript The Flamingo of Cape Cod. While we are not accepting it for publication, we do endeavor whenever possible to provide feedback to aspiring authors of children’s books such as yourself. The inspiration for the book—the first ever sighting, in the summer of 2024,…

Once when I was young, I read a story in the newspaper. A man had gone on a picnic with his wife and children. They spent the day by the lake playing in the water, throwing a football, and doing all the typical things that families do. At the lake the man and his wife…