Jesse arrives home an hour late. The humidity grips him as he climbs the four floors to his apartment. He remembers when he could take the steps two at a time. Now he pauses on every landing. The old building smells like
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The summer Aneka’s leg is broken, her big sister Rima has a sleepover with all of her lacrosse friends. Aneka helps her set up the blow-up beds in the basement. She grabs the pink blankets and floral comforters from the closet where
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Tamara turned her car into the horseshoe driveway in front of her younger sister Cameron’s college dorm, just managing to wedge her car into a spot at the end of the fire zone. It was Friday before Fall break at Louisiana State
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Tisha Kroemer had never felt real fear until that moment. The moment she watched her husband fall off the roof. It was January 9th, already a week past due for the Christmas lights to be down. Tisha walked out of the kitchen
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When she hears his car door shut close behind him, Queen has just finished her to-do list. She writes one every day, not because she thinks it’s evidence of her being a good housewife, but because she knows that people who write
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On the first night the stars fell, the whole suburb rushed out of their beds and looked out their windows to see what kind of rain had caused a glow on their yards. As their eyes traced the rainfall from the ground
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Luz had faked a pregnancy in order to get the attention of her ex-boyfriend Johnny Rivera and kept it going for six months. Not only had other students been whispering that she was full of shit, but now, in her second trimester,
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I stood at that door knowing the second I knocked on it I’d be a murderer. I had just limped two miles up the bayou barefoot, the swampy mud still stuck between the cracks in my toes. My husband Eddie was probably
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Adesanya’s sunken eyes show shadows and fire. The wet earth opens and moves under foot. Behind the log cabin, beyond the stone ridge, stands a grey wind-whipped landscape; it tumbles like a deck of cards. A free-falling disaster charges in gravity’s call,
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When Lenaya is twenty-seven she begins to see pieces of her mama everywhere. In the red lip color worn by a stranger at the bar, in the thick country accent of her bus driver. In the solemn way her husband says her
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The parents had been seduced by the impalpable sanctuary of a promise. They had been lured by a cool and crisp country flowing with potential. They were to be foreigners living in a foreign land, spacious and fertile for opportunity. They were
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I email him and tell him that I want to see him. I send it via email because I deleted his number to keep myself from drunk texting him, as had become my habit. We haven’t talked in weeks; the last message
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“Curse this damned place. I don’t want anything to do with here.” Holson, my best childhood friend, slammed the door and headed off on foot to the nearest mechanic. He just wants to be nobody in a big city. He wants time
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About time, Rose grumbled under her breath as she snatched up her two half-filled garbage bags from the ground and made her way toward the front of the line. Even with an ankle-length skirt on, there was no escaping the scorching midday
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At bedtime, the little girl I babysat grabbed my shirt and whispered, “Don’t go there.” “Go where?” I picked her up and walked through the minimalist-styled kitchen with its dark cabinets and farmhouse sink, to the open living room and up the
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