Stories

The legal pad already had three crossed-out questions at the top, scratched through so hard the pen had scored the paper. She'd written do you miss me and

The mattress kept the shape of a sleeping man long after he stopped sleeping well in it. On retirement, restlessness, and learning to share a bed with a changed schedule.

The highlighter cap was on the table. Not lost - she could see it, two inches from her coffee mug, a small yellow cylinder she'd set down without deciding to. H...

Every night the last lamp in the house went off in the same order, until the night it did not. A quiet story about the small rituals that keep a household, and a marriage, running.

The glasses had scratched left lens that Walter had kept meaning to get fixed. She turned them over in her hands, the way she'd turned the car keys over in her ...

Six seconds to center the clay after thirty years at the wheel, and Dora could not narrate her own hands. Her student's mug came out thumb wide, and it looked right.

Walt bought washers he didn't need so the trip would end in a receipt, until a lab that smelled of cutting oil handed him a paper badge with a blank line.

He went down on his knees in his good gray trousers at the fence line and came away with one lily bulb, paper skinned, from a garden the family no longer owned.

He knotted the left lace twice, the extra loop something he'd started doing after the sole caught on a storm drain and nearly put him face-down on Clement Stree...