“It’s been too damn long,” Jericho said, gazing at me from across the table, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. His dark eyes drawing me in like quicksand. “I agree.” I leaned forward, warmth too strong for the ceiling
They built a church on the land where my body was broken. Parishioners come every Sunday morning believing it to be holy ground. Yet I know this to be the ground where my soul was desecrated one Thursday evening. Prior to being
“Do you know the story about what happened that day? The one that makes Momma cry every time Papa tells it?” I knew the story. It haunted my childhood. Papa only told it on his bad days when working down at Mr.
She went to see if he was dead. But when she got down to Olive Branch and saw Beanie in his hospital bed, his breathing was calm. He groaned, moved his head a lot. Constance’s blade had in fact punctured his left
I’ve been dreaming. In my dreams, my sisters sit in circle formation, our legs crossed after a long day of picking okra. We laugh and cry with one another. We share secrets and indulge in nostalgia. “Remember when we spent our days
I hit the jackpot on the morning of my tenth Christmas, I remember it like it was yesterday. Tiptoeing across the abbreviated L from my bedroom to the entrance of the living room, I spied it. A box. Huge. Sparkly. Adorned with a
“I’ll be damned if anybody beat me again, tellin me I’m ugly and worthless. What’s family? I don’t need you or your bullshit. That’s what I told them when I left. I was thirteen, but I was determined I could make it.
The Solomon family car is small and green and was bought from a used lot seventeen years ago. It is not equipped for long drives. So the Solomons walked, or biked, or drove the car short distances at ten miles under the