It could have gone better. She could actually have turned up, for one thing. The band played on their makeshift platform and the guests chatted on the rented chairs, and murmurs rose to grace the ivy-wrapped rafters. Finally, Luc had to ask, “Where’s Molly, then?” He joked about it, grinned even, but we both knew … Continue reading Unrequited
When the hospitals ran out of space, they made makeshift wards in the parking lots. Semi-sheltered and multi-tiered, the concrete relics were the last dreary thing one saw before leaving Earth. Not much different from the gray, fractured skies outside, but little remained to be a good memory by that point, anyway. My job was … Continue reading Cracked
A year went by without Rupert mentioning anything, but that didn’t mean he stopped thinking about it. You saw the references in his every move. In his hobby, his obsession, most especially. “That’s the last of them, I think,” he’d said, laying golden roses on the kitchen table. You’d looked out the window to the … Continue reading Letting a Wild Thing Grow
John Robert Brown was as average as possible. He drove a secondhand automobile, subscribed to the Evening Standard, and worked nights at the local clothing factory oiling machinery. He no longer owned a prosperous farm in the wheat belt--the world was changing, and cities were the new pastures.I can smell it coming, Old Isobel had … Continue reading Painting the Town
As a child, Lettie Nash loved letters. She loved the curve, the swoop, the long stroke, the quiet point. Then as she grew, letters became words, became sentences, became prose, and overflowing with things to say she wrote and wrote and wrote.Her mother made her hide her work, lest her father find and burn it … Continue reading Lettie’s Letters
