passage

“It’s the fourth quarter,” my aunt said. We had eaten pizza, and now we were sitting on family heirloom dining room chairs, around a big table. “Death is never pretty,” my uncle said. And that felt truthful. My sister said she regretted so much not having children. We got updates on the addict, the pregnancies. […]

pink carnations

All my siblings have mental health hurdles, but one of them has a worser case than the rest of us. This led to me being suddenly disinvited from an anticipated luxurious staycation around the same time as the first dead birthday of a friend. I’m kind of proud of that sentence, although it’s for me, […]

Annotated Bibliography, Winter

If I wait for this spider to crawl out of this room, then maybe I can go after her. And on the other side of the wall there’ll be this underwater world and I’ll swim to the deep end and float next to the one of those electrical fish that light up in the dark. […]

Household Words 3

The fact is, I only met Ellen’s parents a handful of times before I went off to San Diego. When people die, it’s natural to magnify their significance retroactively. I tried. I didn’t have a lot to go on. I observed nothing compelling about Ben and Amanda Walden. Maybe her mother’s eyes were too […]