He was crossing the road onto Trafalgar Square just like everyone else around him. They were tourists, for the most part, people who had come here deliberately. It was going to be an evening for it. The clouds, if they could even be called that, had floated off again, leaving no doubt about the weather.
I. The summer we found the skull was also the summer that Smith got stuck in the sluice gate and nearly drowned, and somehow those two events have been inextricably linked in my mind ever since. Looking back now, it is as if together they formed a threshold, a kind of boundary between the first
Dying was the easy part. When my children moved to Amsterdam, and later, when my husband departed this world, I endured difficult times. But hardest of all was the day I accepted the only way to escape my agony was to leave my body behind. With each passing year, I lost friends and family to
Now and then, when the moon flaunts a particularly peculiar hue, one is overcome with an insatiable yearning to fall backwards. The first port of call is more often than not the scrapbook. But, typically, upon looking at the postcards within, memories fade into milky incandescence. Some girls will then turn to systematic meditation, sitting
Carl figured there just weren’t enough adjoining plots in Our Lady of Sacred Light’s cemetery to accommodate the family in full—the dead and the would-be dead. So, they were split up—father and mother in one space, plots for Carl and Nate in another. Carl’s father was the first to go, and he was gone for
Peter’s fingers brush Caitlin’s as he takes the pamphlet from her hand. He nearly says, ‘Jesus Christ, your hands are freezing,’ but stops himself. It’s overfamiliar, when they’ve just met. ‘“Creeping nothingness”,’ says Caitlin. ‘That’s how you described it on the contact form, right?’ ‘Right,’ says Peter, pretending to read the testimonials. ‘Thanks.’ His thumb
This was the bed in which Emma had slept. This was the story book that Emma had loved. And this was the chair beside the bed where Sally had sat and read the book aloud. The bed remained. The chair endured. But Emma was not in her bed and Sally was not reading her a
I sit with a book in Arlington Square. I am not alone. Benches around me thrive with people reading, scrolling through their phones. It’s the kind of square where locals or those who walk find themselves when the weather is bright. A place for people with time to kill to kill such time without being
The few who knew him well referred to him as Fred Milktoast. A quiet, precise little man, Fred Milligan knew his business and no one in the Office of City Budget & Finance could attest to a single numerical error on his part over the past forty years. Numbers were his business. Married to simple,
In the discordant days of my youth, there is no one I remember more fondly than my uncle, my namesake. An infrequent guest to our family home in the early nineties, he’d fly over from London and spend a fortnight on our front room couch. My mother and my grandmother would busy themselves in the
