Linnet learned early that she didn’t have to be nice if she didn’t want to be nice. And she didn’t need to be liked if she didn’t want to be liked. If people had a problem with her attitude, or with her face, or with her wide, white ghost-eye, she lived at the very tippy-top […]

We were a house of many schedules. We passed in the kitchen, nodding, guessing from what others were eating which stage they were at in their day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Beginning, middle, end. We’d been friends once. Then we were roommates. Then we were people who pooled the rent, and that was the most you […]

The River Folk are among the most stubborn individuals I’ve encountered during my limited travels through the American south. Though more than willing to exchange pleasantries, most are unwilling to speak above a whisper in my presence, let alone sing or perform. But they are fascinating, vibrant, eternally youthful, and more than content to live […]

It was playground rhymes that broke the world. It was the rhymes, waiting underneath the grass and the asphalt and sand. Not us. * * * “I had a weird dream,” Sara Beth was saying, that recess the day before it happened. “There was something under the asphalt.” “That’s not a weird dream,” Lizzie Beth […]

After a hundred years—after more and after less—she wakes. Her hands are women’s hands, but these hips have never held a child. Her thighs remember dragons, her feet foreign oceans. She does not know her name. She knows too many. Each bone sings the telling of a different war. For some time, she cannot move. […]