We are barrelling down American Avenue when the shuttle swerves again, throwing Missy up against the side of the van. She looks like she’s about to vomit, holding her purse in toward her stomach, and I can’t help but feel something. Missy is who she is and I am who I am, as the van…

It ends like it begins: with the tide. There is always the ocean, always the waves clawing hungrily at the shore. That’s the problem with these gaps, these spaces, these pieces of emptiness on the edge of things. They want. Our father left her sealskin under a floorboard in the attic. It wasn’t a mistake;…

A man stares at the tree, bark folded like his own skin, branches like veins against a stone-gray sky. They creak and groan like old bones.  Just prune the limbs, he’d told his son. No need to uproot the whole damned thing.  It’s older than he is by two decades, a relic of halcyon days…

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…