Esophageal cancer is the worst way to go. Most people my age aren’t even aware of their esophagus—just that we have a system of pipes inside us and all we have to do is make sure air and food pass through the correct ones—until the circuitry of swallowing doesn’t work. My father was sixty when …
This story received the Red Rock Review’s 2022 nomination for the Pushcart Prize. No one came to my grandfather’s wake. Moriah wasn’t a big place—unincorporated, the county roads screamed, like some sailor’s warning—but even so, I had never been in St. Mark’s when it was empty. Only Grandpa could keep the faithful away, the way …
Tyler Raymond broke her one rule: he recorded her. At first, she thought he was a diligent note-taker, making pencil-sweeps across his page, but when she walked through the lecture hall, she saw his sweeps were only oars and racing shells. She read his sweatshirt: Rowing Crew XL. Another freshman rowing scholar, probably told by …
“What if I cheated on you?” Hattie always came at Tom with wild scenarios: what if you found a prettier girlfriend, what if I cheated on you, what if there’s a nuclear winter and the survival of humanity depends on you hooking up with Barbara Palvin? He’d told her he liked Barbara Palvin once when …
The clock in the Licensing Center is the kind they always have at school or the DMV: black digits pimpled over a field of white. It tells 3:34 p.m. Seth DeBerg follows the clock’s only color, the ceaseless second-hand, with its obvious color of red tape and its bloodletting speed. By now the ice in …
Sunset 9036 was mostly blood-red and everyone digested that in their own way. Aunt Gilly stood out in the road and prayed, which had me grateful most of the neighbors had already gone. Mom couldn’t be bothered with sunsets. She wandered out to the Bakers’ farm field, holding her cell phone up to the sky …
