Why Two Electric Hair Clippers Appeared on the Dance Floor at Our Reception

I looked out the high, narrow window of the basement office, watching the tires of a passing pickup truck stir up the red dirt on the street level. The cost of this step was a heavy one; my daughter would have to see her father’s name on a criminal docket in the local newspaper, and…

The legal fees would take almost everything I had left. If the judge did not dissolve the injunction on the fifteenth, I would be broke and landless, standing in the cold with nothing but a truck and a box of old military records. My father had spent thirty years building his name in this valley,…

I looked at the black camera sitting between us. It was the same camera David had used to take photos of our children at their high school graduations, the same one we had taken to the Grand Canyon for our twentieth anniversary. He had kept it in the top drawer of his dresser, wrapped in…

The kitchen looked different without the highchairs and the three baby bottles drying on the rack by the sink. It looked like the house we had bought before the babies arrived, a quiet, sterile space where everything had its place and nothing was ever out of order. I walked back down the hall, holding the…

The room smelled of stale heater dust and old synthetic carpet, a stark departure from the polished hardwood of Elmwood Avenue. I sat on the edge of the mattress, my fingers touching the cold metal of my wristwatch, and pulled it one notch tighter against my wrist. I did not open the drawer to look…

I picked up the silver ring on my finger, twisting it around and around until my knuckle was red and sore. The hum of the small basement refrigerator was the only sound in the room, a steady, mechanical vibration that reminded me of the old refrigerator in Margaret’s kitchen. There was no inheritance coming to…