Category: Story Time

YOU WOULDN’T KNOW the place was there at all, if you didn’t know where to look.  It’s a long way out, Carrie told people, knowing they would get only as far as the old cemetery, where pavement gave way to dirt winding darkly through corridors of pine and brush. Then they would turn back, thinking they had passed it. [...]

No one talks about the life rattle, the one she makes in her crib, florid with her first-ever cold—the result of a germ you overlooked. The perks of parenthood, unlimited stains on your record, dishonour splashed across your breast. You could signpost every spot: first waddle through the busted gate; the burner where you superheat [...]

She smells smoke. Moving swiftly in the dark, T’Rayles pushes through the dense forest as she makes her way back to the village. The smoke grows stronger with every scarred birch and solid spruce she passes. It’s not the comforting scent of a home’s hearth or metallic tang of the blacksmith’s forge. No. It smells of [...]

Estella had to walk around the train to get to the platform, and she watched as the Diamonds and the other passengers spilled out of the two passenger cars, thankful to have arrived and anxious to get to their beds. Oliver and his sons began to ferry the women and children in the Oldsmobile and [...]

Natalie and her friends wore stiff neon vests like sandwich boards advertising their faith in finding Bettina, the little girl who’d wandered into the bush three days ago. At least Natalie’s friends had faith—this was their second time through the same field because Morgan had a “good feeling”. They were just a few of the [...]

MOLLY stands at a table brushing COLIN’s police dress jacket and pants. MOLLY (to the audience) He was terrible funny with the limericks, Colin was. The scourge of the church, though that didn't stop him. He'd make up new ones every day. New ways to embarrass me, reciting them to anyone, anywhere.  Some of them were lovely [...]

The picnic table, a husk of cracked, salt-worn wood, brittle onion-skin paint branded by cuss words, its struts bolted to concrete too near a chain-link fence.   The lawn runs to the ocean, leaps over pebbles and prairie dog holes to the tide that drags the picnic table toward the cruise ships flaring like birthday [...]

I turned a corner and got God. That’s how they’ll tell it to the future gens. They won’t say nuts about the smiley smackin’ through my head, that I had to piss. They’ll say I was the thirteen who killed so many in corp wars but cried for the first time in all his years of warring after seeing the perfection of the Monkeyman’s face. They’ll spout that my geneticized heart was opened to love. They’ll write [...]

So shy, immaterial, you lit out at night for a climate that knows no change, peeping to the call of winter in Jamaica, first-primed paradise. Now, Swainson’s warbler, spread your wings wide, a better treat than an eagle in the hands of the migrating naturalist, your if-a-tree-falls- in-the-forest rock-a-bye-ba- by song interrupted by glass. More [...]

Wake up, Kay heard. Wake, wake, wake up, girl, whispering, then a tweedling humming, wake up wake up again, all very soft and almost sleeping in her ear. The air was cool and sweet. She had been dreaming, running along a path after Annie as the dark was coming, and where was Thea? Lost, as [...]