Professor Murphy looks up at the enormous pull-down screen playing black-and-white video of Coney Island amusements side by side with stills from the workaday world they might have been meant to simulate. People scream on roller coasters alongside photos of automobiles speeding along steep and winding roads. “The fear of uncontrolled movement,” she says. […]
Lita was two months behind on rent when she saw the poster on a jobs board. The first body found belonged to a stranger. That made it easier to forget, after the first fascinating horror, even if the circumstances were gruesome. She was found on the footpath along the river that goes past the supermarket. […]
We stand outside the schoolhouse, a huddle of uncertain birds, a collective knot of shoulders bowed low by grief. We, the parents of the children who are gone. It is bright daylight; we don’t dare come here after dark. […]
I could have protested, of course. She had the credits — financial, green, and gray. An attorney easily could have argued that she was owed at least three more days. Maybe four. […]
coming July 22
Luci stepped into the ocean, begging it to take her. The water was cold — morning just breaking on the horizon, throwing golden streamers of light onto Watch Point, shadowing the rocky coastline where she entered. Smooth stones, gray in sunlight or shadow. […]
coming July 22
Our brother raises us on sugar-frosted corn flakes and lullabies from forgotten centuries. He raises us with storybooks of a time when giants walked the earth, big and strong and stout, and with shadow-puppet bunnies and wolves chasing each other across the peeling-papered walls. […]
coming July 22
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