Shannon Airport was empty at 8:30 in the morning, just twenty of us stumbling off the red-eye from Toronto. A few dark-jacketed employees leaned on brooms to watch the fatigued arrivals. One pointed me to the bus for Limerick, where a small, gray-haired man waited. “I’m going to Shannon View Farm,” I said, “Will you…
In the dim forest cabin, a brown bear stared at me. He sniffed my suitcase. I froze. The bear looked at me with his deep black eyes. We gazed at each other. No longer afraid of him, I felt a close connection. I watched as he explored the small, rustic room, pawing at the door…
“They know locks are important,” the nurse says when she sees me watching a man, younger than my father, twist the switch of a deadbolt nailed to the wall in the dayroom—one of many locks nailed to the wall. Puzzles that can never be solved. Total fake-outs. A tumbler lock, a sliding door latch, an…
I’m surprised how long it takes her heart to stop. Strong old girl. Dr. Murrell keeps the stethoscope pressed to her ribs. I lean down in front of her unblinking eyes. “You’re a good dog, Abby,” I assure her. Deb, Denny, and Dr. Murrell agree. “You are a good dog, Abby.” A beat or…
She held my dog’s paw like a gentle jewel. Wind blew her hair into a moonlit arc of ocean. I sat on the tub while she shaved her legs. We shrugged in the downpour. Playground wings and swings, unchained laughter. The pop of her lips released the bottle and her grin. Naked on the porch….
Soldiers gnawed the ends of twigs to make brushes. What they sketched would be used to identify them when they were returned to their families for ancestor worship. Gun oil as paint. The war-dead accrued on their papers. Roofs broken in with jacketed lead and herbicides, an expanse of fire. It was the end of…
When Luce gets home, the girl is standing in her living room. She looks about thirty, raw and full of want. “You must be Luce,” the girl says, wheeling around. Jangling energy flies off her in every direction. She’s been sent up from a magazine in the city. Luce has agreed the girl can stay…
She had a bed that came out of her wall. Every night, she made it appear and every morning, she made it disappear. “I never knew anyone like you,” he told her the first time he watched the magic trick. “What, a grown woman with a murphy bed? You think when I was your age…
The sign is nailed to a two-by-four, part of a raw wood skeleton built around the door. In the last few minutes the snow has brightened, and the barbed wire fencing and the trees on the horizon scrawl out messages—mainly that any notions I might’ve had are wrong here. I walk past a dog in…
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