The girl is seven. The boys are older, maybe nine. From the kitchen window, she watches them try to blow the lid off a garbage can with firecrackers.  They hoot and holler. Then they see a cat, and one of the boys grabs the cat and tells the others to run into the garage and […]

The man’s nails dig into my skin, leaving angry red crescents alongside the needle marks in my arms. My feet are folded under me, scraping against the floor as he drags me forward. The man is over six feet tall with a shaved head and stubble on his face, and he reeks of cigarettes. He […]

Right after his bath, she dries him and then gets a Q-tip so there’s wax in his ear canal to stop her, Sophie, a brown recluse spider, as she climbs down his left ear because he sleeps on his right. Sophie finds his ear canal much warmer than the cardboard in the basement, and it’s […]

She died at home two days later. Her mother and father and brothers were with her. Hannah Madison, who was not present, would weep for days. Paul Hoffman insisted, his wife silent and unsteady and distraught, that his daughter be buried sans casket, deep in the ground in the manner she’d asked for. It took […]

A month later Vanessa Hoffman went back into the hospital. Old meds faltered and new medications were tried. She was connected to machines again and monitored twenty-four hours a day. Days became nights and nights became days and the hours ticked by and nurses were on and off duty and doctors came and went and […]