He left the baby in a clay basket tucked just under the overhang of the roof. A tuft of straw drifted down and she stirred sleepily before clenching it tightly in her fist and settling back under her blanket, which he tucked around her to make sure she’d stay warm long enough for one of …
Category Archives: fiction
Under the Roses
When we moved into the new house, we spent a few hours going over it with the old owners, walking through empty rooms, feet ringing on the floors. They showed us where the switches and breakers were, went over the heater’s finicky pilot, all the little details you wish you had when moving in to …
Rabid
She’d heard the stories, but she never quite believed them until that day, and once the events were over, she still found herself wondering if they’d happened at all. If, perhaps, she was so jarred by everything that had happened that her mind had made up something fantastical and bizarre to explain it. She never …
Stories
The rocking chair at the far end of the porch is hers. In the afternoons, the golden light warms the wood and makes it look like liquid honey, softening the sharp lines and angles and bouncing off the porch railing to fill the air with a light so dense that it almost seems palpable. She …
The Dead
The dead watched her. At first she thought it was ordinary, and everyone lived in the world like she did, as though you were living in a giant fishbowl, watched by silent, judging ghosts just beyond a glass wall. When she was a child, sometimes they played with her, especially when they, too, were children, …
The Ethics of Fallen Fruit
She’s smoking a cigar in the study. The window is cracked open and it admits the spell of petrichor and something else, a fusty combination of leaves crumbling on the ground and emerging fungi and dried grass. A breeze pushes the deep blue smoke in swirls around the study, where it climbs the walls as …
In the Palm of Her Hand
He bought her the world for their first anniversary. They ate at the tapas place she liked, which he realised in retrospect should have been a presage of things to come. When all the plates were cleared away, they exchanged gifts across the table in the low light of the guttering candle, under the glares …
Cold Plunge
The water is so cold it burns, and he gasps involuntarily, closing his mouth just before he sinks below the surface. Bubbles whoosh past his ear and for a moment everything around him is swirling indistinctly. He hovers in the water, trying to bear it long enough for the disturbance he has created to settle, …
Carrots
She’s thinning carrots when I get out to the house, bent awkwardly over the barrel, trying to balance the ungainly weight of the pregnancy against the pull of gravity. She looks much larger than I had imagined she would, far too large for someone who isn’t carrying twins, like she has a fully grown adult …
Moving the Body
She’s perched on the top rail of the fence when I first see her, affecting a casual pose that attempts to say ‘I haven’t been waiting for you all day, I just happened to hop up here to read my book for a while.’ Her face is tight and pinched, and she slams the book …
