Fiction

The pale-blue sky stretches to the horizon, broken up here and there by tendrils of white scudding along like wispy phantoms.

“It’s him – I’m sure of it.”

“Lizzie, I think your imagination is working overtime. It’s not him.”

On a long inland lake shaped like a kidney bean, banked by low cliffs and surrounded by miles of boreal forest, brooded over by a solid grey sky, a lone canoe zigs and zags about the central waters…

Cooler by the lake was no longer heard on the evening news, and in the sunbaked hills that ringed town, the cherries—normally at market by now—clung to the trees like peas.

“Nice deep breaths, Mrs. Crandall. In through your nose, out through your mouth…” Helen Crandall was becoming more aware. She was flat…

Before they leave, his mother and sister and him, for what will turn out to be their last visit to the hospital, Jake, twelve and a half years old, sits in his father’s office in the basement.

Two children picked their way down the curve of a beach, in the clear air that follows a storm. The cyclone had strewn junk across their path…

I’m shivering in a hospital gown and Hanes underwear. A nurse brings me another blanket, crisp with hot starch. I want to cry.