Timbuktu

Timbuktu

Mr. Bones knew that Willy wasn’t long for this world. The cough had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn’t a chance in hell that he would ever get rid of it. Slowly and inexorably, without once taking a turn for the better, the thing had assumed...
Damned If I Do

Damned If I Do

Warm and Nicely Buried “Mrs. Marotta, Jose is gone.” The woman took Fragua’s hand and patted it as if consoling him. “Yes, my son is dead.” She assured him that her feet were planted firmly on real ground. “Mrs. Marotta, I...
Time Shelter

Time Shelter

At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a...
Bewilderment

Bewilderment

Over the run of eighty minutes, I tried to convey to a coven of twenty-one-year-olds with a wide spectrum of intellectual abilities just how absurd it was for everything to spring up out of nothing. The alignment of favorable circumstances for the emergence of...
Sisters

Sisters

The house burbles around us. The water chokes out of the tap. She doesn’t catch our eyes. She washes and then passes things to me and I dry them and then give them to September to put in the cupboard. I want to tell Mum how we’re sorry, really sorry, about what...
Case Study

Case Study

I continued to pass my evenings in the parlour, but I had grown impatient with the drivel I read. There seemed no reason why I could not do better, or at least have a stab at doing so. I began to write little sketches of the characters I encountered at work. Then for...