In your head, there’s that sound. You know, that sound when you get scared or embarrassed. It’s like when you’re a kid at the beach on family vacation when you’re seven, and your older brother who’s ten comes up to you and says to press a shell up against your ear, like this, he says, and so you do, and that’s the sound it makes. But you’re not pressing up a seashell to your ear…

Your Blood

He laughs.
That’s what his name meant. 
It still means that, in a technical sense. Those are still the words printed next to the name in those books full of names for unborn babies. But his name is not the same. Not to Lola. Inevitably, things change when things die…

Isaac

Oh, poor Laurel. On the first day of sleepaway camp she had lost her only hair tie.
“Where in the world?”
She said this out loud in the same tone she heard her mother use, searching for her purse in the early morning darkness. Where in the world, where in the world, her mother would repeat it as Laurel sipped the fruity milk from her cereal bowl, eyelids closed, yawn approaching…

Canoes

It’s tougher when you’re old. It all is. Eloisa knew. She learned so for herself, passing the city days in solitude. Her friends were all dead -- in fact they died quite young for old folk. She was the only one of them to make it to the grand age of seventy-two. It had been twenty years since then. Twenty years since she’d made a friend…

Ninety-Two

My mother told me I was too old to be so silly, that night after I walked into the darkness. Those were her words, verbatim. Silly, she said. Like a ten-year-old going into intermediate school. Not at all like a twenty-year-old girl. The last time I saw her she held my head in her hands, put her fingers into my thick hair and looked straight into my face. It looked like she was searching for something she couldn’t find…

The Art of Nothing

Lou’s body was in the middle of the road. Fur matted and torn, his blood saturated the concrete. I was on my knees, my hands over him. I wanted to touch him but I couldn’t. He looked as though he was the punchline of a joke my grandfather, Poppy, used to tell me too often.
What’s black and white and red all over?…

The Punchline