The dissertation lay dying. The operating table was a mess, littered with all of Jody’s surgical implements. Diagrams, post-it webs, red pens, black pens, paper clips, the locket of St. Dymphna (or Jude?) inherited from her mother, and sprawled across it

Hernandez, the name, is not hers. It belongs to Carlos. She's been meaning to change back to her maiden name, Matsuoka, but she hasn't found the time. Sometimes Martha wonders if she's holding on to the name for the same reason she's holding on to the Kauai wedding…

My mother looked up and began to laugh, it was a nervous tittering, but there was delight in her eyes at the crazy spectacle of our small black puppy eluding, probably taunting all these armed police.

Rose would have preferred to survey the wreckage alone, between sips of her earl grey, but the morning light drew her attention to blonde and jet black curls weaving into folds of fabric.

The old-timers at the Working Man’s Club wear a sheen of indifference every Wednesday night. Beneath the wafting, cresting mountains of burning cigarettes smoke, the train-track rattle of dominoes chipping at the dark wood tables in the corner, the consta

The cat lay in the street, the right side of her skull smashed into the pavement, brains oozing and blood pooling around her...

You don’t like the look of Ruther as he comes out of the tin-roofed hut and squints into the sun. He looks like a real troublemaker. Just what you need right now. It’s going to be one of those days when you wake up and your coffee maker shorts out, you

Three of them were beating the horse with branches the size of small tree trunks. The other one, the man with the crumpled fedora, stood in the courtyard sharpening something that looked like a machete.