Stories

What you seek has eluded you. Yet you stay on. You take comfort in the music.

Suddenly Julia’s silence had solidified like cold fat in a frying pan.

The jealous Othello, ready for murder, was transformed into a school-boy.

I’m alive, Sarah thinks, the slam of his look going all the way in.

The social-media world was ablaze with his daughter’s bagunça.

His flannel sleeve dangled into the flame. Pretty soon, I was on fire too.

Our father crumbled after her affair. We watched him for signs of cracking.

Maybe he was preparing for a disaster that would never happen.

I thought about the little graveyard where the man would be laid.

When he bent close to her, his balaclava glowed silvery in the dying sunlight.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

I must tell you what it is like to be human, or you will drift away.

Her last relationship was with Elsa’s Instagram, truth be told. If Elsa is going to accept her follower invite, it needs to look believable. You did a bad thing, she thinks, and this is what you get.

“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”

She’ll grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet.

That late afternoon in the park, with its kiss, wasn’t an ending or a beginning; it was both. The piano had been a great bird rustling and swooping in the vast space.

“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”

I build our life together as I want it to be.

Evangeline thinks of the forged double-bit whistling through the air.

“What’s the shittiest thing you’ve ever done to someone?” she said.

If you can be seen, you can be killed. No-man’s-land is everyman’s land.

He says to his boots, “Well, suppose we went for fish.”

My father would have ended my clandestine career on the spot.

Let’s put a frog in his bed and have him feel it jump all over him.

Youth! Goodness! Joy! Hope! Strange things to bring to a place like this.

Gerard sat in the shadow, watching his son steal about like a thief.

I yanked him halfway out of his car and punched him in the nose.

Why do you keep so much from your husband, don’t you trust him?

Her mother always complained Sara was different after a night at Judy’s.

I wish I could tell him he’s not going to hell. It would be so freeing for him.