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In the morning, with both boys still sleeping, I got my coat and headed out. In the past, I would have made breakfast for my husband and son, done the dishes, the laundry - a good wife, until I couldn't anymore, because it felt like a pillow was pressed on my face, cutting off my oxygen. The sun wa…

That night he makes her read to him about a tree that once ran in great vertical veins of living ore from Georgia to Newfoundland, out through Canada, and past the Great Lakes to where they camp out together by lamplight. She tells him about giants four feet wide, their trunks shooting eighty feet …

One crystal blue fall morning, a bellow comes from the other room. Her nickname, stretched out to the length of stillness, without the final consonant: Daaa . . . Her skin creeps. It’s worse than the bellow he makes when he fouls the bed and needs her to come clean him. Once more she runs, as if th…

PAST RETIREMENT AGE, Patricia works like there’s no tomorrow. Or like tomorrow might yet show up, if enough people dug in and worked. She has two jobs, each the other’s opposite. In the one she hates, she stands behind podiums begging for money, stuttering like a black-backed woodpecker pile-drivin…

Today he rereads yesterday’s effort—two pages about what it meant to watch his Mimi get her eyes swabbed with fire. Then he takes up the Bic and pushes it in furrows across the page. It’s like he’s slinging trees again, up and down the contours of a hillside. Problem is, while he’s on the general s…