It could be a shed for livestock, or farm equipment; anything except kitchen supplies. The dark green paint job looks fresh, trying to blend into landscape; an attempt to appear inconspicuous. Eyes of greasy men watch from across the road, cigarettes dangling from their bearded mouths. Sounds of hammering and tinkering from their garage fills the […]
Our high school rose above Istanbul like a mausoleum, and its corridors steeped in mildew and silence. Every stair groaned like a coffin lid, the walls bled with forgotten mosaics clawing their way back to the surface, and it sounded as if the building had learned to exhale slowly, the way the sea does before […]
The front door slams downstairs. If I hear whistling, it’s dad. If not, it’s her. I count my heartbeats in my throat. The sun has started its slow descent. The many-petaled leaves of the mimosa brush against the window screen like waves against the shore. Footsteps thunk across the floor toward the kitchen. No whistle. […]
Russell Hastings checked his wristwatch. It was a few minutes past eleven p.m. Central Park was cloaked in the darkness of an unseasonably warm October. He had just under seven hours left on his graveyard shift. A bag of sandwiches and a large thermos he stole from his grandfather years ago filled with diet soda […]
Nathan Blaustein was a short man, with narrow, seemingly inert ice blue eyes that nevertheless were penetrating. No one closely observing him as he stood mutely taking in his wife Bea’s histrionic distress would make the mistake of thinking him unfeeling. For there was something in the way he watched her, in the way the […]
When it comes to getting rid of your wife and best friend in one night, timing is everything. So many things can go wrong. So many threads need to align. But the truth is, I could have been an actor or director in another life. I recognize, unlike most, that everyone has their roles to […]
It’s gone, I think. I can no longer hear the clicking sound it makes. Others like it chitter and call to others of their horrid kind. I have been hiding in the collapsed marquee of a theatre (Waiting for Godot was showing here in the before times, the lettering reads) waiting for the thing to […]
I never understood my father. It might sound clichéd, but it is true. My father had been in active service during the war, fighting against tyranny. I was still in the womb when he departed, off to some foreign place, danger waiting for him on muddy fields with gunfire acting as the song of a […]
It made no sense that we should be haunted by the coyote, and a whole town no less. If it had been the ghost of the child, or if it had haunted the Weaver family, or Joe Maclean, the man who’d tracked the creature, shot it and brought back the tattered dress of Lily Weaver […]
Life had never felt the same since the murder of my father. He had been a cruel and wretched man—harsh, loveless, and incapable of seeing me as anything more than his second-born and, therefore, unworthy of much regard. I had no illusions about his feelings, and yet, in the wake of his death, something restless […]