Taylor plopped down next to me on the crunchy grass the Friday before Halloween. None of this would have happened, had I woken up early enough to ride my bike. She started chatting immediately, apparently not noticing my look of confusion or the ear-buds jammed into my head, my signal to the rest of the…

I knew that Jimmy Pallotta was my birth father in the same way I knew that the brown stain on my forearm was a birth mark. Everyone has a birth mark somewhere. Birth mark, birth father. They carried the same weight in my life. Besides, the man had eight other children; his plate runneth over….

She always wore her seatbelt, but not this time. Sharp, shooting pains ricocheted through her ribs with such veracity that the mere thought of strapping the belt across her chest stole the air from her lungs and left her gasping. Naked without her seatbelt, she tried to convince herself that car accidents only happen when…

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. And God said, “Let there be love!” And there appeared before him a vast spread of playing cards. And God said to the archangel Azrael, “What is this?” And Azrael replied, “Your greatness, this is the game of Memory.” And God said to the angel, “How do we…

For more than a year, a ghost lived in our house. Every morning I would see her in our lemon-yellow kitchen — standing at the sink, gazing out the window at the bird feeder, reading the newspaper at the dinette. When she saw me, she would vanish. She stayed until Halloween, until my tiny six-year-old…

The woman was a mother, daughter, wife, a small-business owner, a fashion designer, a social maven, daughter-in-law, friend, employer, dog mother. She was also a part-time bougainvillea tree which bloomed fuchsia and vermillion and white. **  The only person in the world who knew her secret was the gardener. There was little point in hiding…

Holly was taking her work home with her. She had been for a while. It wasn’t much at first, not as it was now. It came on with a subtlety, gentle as late summer turning to early autumn. Nothing in particular announced it, nothing triggered it as far as she could tell. It was a…

Darkness unspooling on the other side of the glass disappeared under the fog of her breath. Head resting against the window, she scribbled 4 5 27 in the mist, before erasing the numbers with a long sigh. She was tired, but not sleepy, even though it was past midnight and they had left the last…

There’s a voice message on my phone at work – Harry’s throaty growl. ‘I need to see you Jess,’ he barks. ‘I need your help. You better come’.  I imagine his face close to mine, adding ‘or else you’ll be sorry,’ in his Glaswegian twang, his face pink, his teeth bared. Just like in the…