Best Stories

PART 1 I felt the tear before I felt the pain — a hot, wrong sensation low in my back, and then the world tilted sideways off the loading dock. “Someone call 911!” A voice, far away. Boxes of medical supplies scattered across wet concrete around me. My hands went instinctively to my stomach, to…

PART 1 The smell hit me before the boy did — wet wool, and underneath it, blood. Not much. A thin line down his knuckles, already drying. He stood in the doorway of my diner with rain sheeting off the awning behind him, maybe nine years old, wearing a coat that cost more than my…

PART 1 It was two in the morning on a rain-soaked Tuesday when twenty-year-old Vivienne Marsh looked up and found herself staring straight into the eyes of the most dangerous man in New York. The underground lounge reeked of cigar smoke and things nobody said out loud, but it only took a fraction of a…

PART 1 “Wow. Somebody really let herself go.” Trevor’s voice carried across the packed downtown café like he wanted every table to hear it, his new girlfriend snickering against his shoulder like the two of them had rehearsed this moment on the drive over. He genuinely believed he’d landed a punch, mocking the extra weight…

PART 1 By the end of my shift my scrubs had stopped feeling like clothing and started feeling like a second layer of skin, damp with twelve hours of other people’s emergencies. I clocked out through the side door of the hospital a little past eleven, red scarf wound twice around my throat, bag slung…

PART 1 The dust hadn’t even settled from Vivian’s twenty-dollar bill before I recognized that shade of blond peeking out from under two matching pale-blue hats, and my whole chest went hollow with a question I couldn’t yet let myself ask out loud. We’d been driving toward the caterer’s when Vivian’s hand shot out and…

PART 1 The smell of burnt sugar and old paper still finds me in dreams sometimes, the exact scent of the office where a man once decided my body belonged to him more than it belonged to me. I remember the door clicking shut. I remember his hand, warm and much too heavy, sliding down…

PART 1 The cardboard box in my arms had started to give way at the corner three blocks ago, and I still had two more to go before I reached the shelter of the museum’s loading dock. I had learned, over twenty-six years, not to ask for help I didn’t strictly need. It was easier…

PART 1 The autumn wind swept across the lonely plains of Wyoming Territory in 1888, carrying dust, dry leaves, and a silence that had settled over the Brooks ranch for nearly three years. The homestead was still standing. The horses were cared for. The fences held. The cattle grazed the hills the same as they…

PART 1 The wagon axle cracked somewhere east of Coldwell Flats, and that was how Josephine Hart ended up standing in the middle of a road that was more dust than dirt, six children fanned out behind her like birds that had forgotten how to fly. She didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried in a long…