Mama always hung the laundry at night, beneath a moon that swelled fat and silver, trailing silk light across our backyard. Said the moon softened fabric better than the sun ever could. I’d sit barefoot on the back stoop, knees hugged tight, watching her shadow sway between sheets like a lighthouse keeper tending ghosts. Her skirts swirled with the wind, and her pale arms rose and fell in rhythm, lifting garments that floated like saints in surrender. She never l...

He used to make her omelets on Sundays. Mushrooms, green peppers, cheese grated thin. He called it his specialty. He poured coffee into her cup before his own and kissed her forehead through the steam. She used to think that meant love. The whisk against the bowl, the scrape of the spatula, the sound of him humming while she sat barefoot in the kitchen. Love had a sound back then. Now the whisk means she is late. He comes home at six. Always six. She has fifteen minutes to get...

It started with a palm frond. One of those thick, green giants that fan out over Florida yards like they own the place. My Uncle Bob ripped one clean off the tree, held it high over his head, and marched barefoot around the pool. Jimmy Buffett’s “Volcano” blared from the lanai speakers, steel drums skipping over sun-soaked chaos. Kids doing cannonballs, adults sloshing bourbon in plastic cups, and bathing suits doubling as dinner clothes. He said nothing. Just grinned and kept moving. We followed. Every one of us. Cousins dripping pool water, aunts in cover-ups, and the dogs trotting at our heels, nails clicking on the pavement as if they were tap dancing. The conga line snaked through the screen door, into the kitchen, and around the card table stacked with paper plates and Publix potato salad. No one asked why.

The day after Mary Ellen was arrested, Mama made biscuits and gravy. I woke to the smell of bacon grease popping in the skillet, thick and salty, mixed with something heavier—flour catching on cast iron. The air already felt thick, even with the windows cracked. I slipped on my Sunday dress, the pale blue one with the peter-pan collar and padded barefoot through the hallway. The fan in the living room pushed warm air around like it was doing something. The linoleum in the kitchen was cool, cracked at the corners. My bare heels stuck to it when I walked.

Feeds: PO AD LIB. It appeared one morning in blue ink on her whiteboard, just below her weight and care times—another piece of coded hospital language I wasn’t meant to understand. Another mysterious acronym in a sea of them, bobbing somewhere between hope and heartbreak. I stared at those three words for a long time. After five weeks of bracing myself for bad news and interpreting every beep, chart, and monitor, here was a phrase so quiet I nearly missed it. In the NICU, everything meant something, and anything could mean everything. Where one small change could unravel everything or stitch something back together. No one warns you that birth can drop you into another world. Where day and night are meaningless and your child’s life depends on machines that sound like alarms in a spaceship.

My daughter Frankie doesn’t say my name. She knows it. I’ve heard her whisper it at night, curled up in her toddler bed, when the house is quiet and the shadows stretch across the floor. “Mommy,” she breathes, and for a second I believe I’ve dreamed it. At night, behind her door, she practices. Soft words slip out like secrets, as if she’s testing them before anyone can hear. Pressure shuts her down. But in the dark, when no one is watching, her voice feels safe. In the daylight, I try. I kneel. I call to her. She turns to me, eyes bright, smile full, but I can tell she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. She opens her mouth like she’s going to answer, but instead I hear bits of “Old McDonald” or sounds that don’t quite form words.

The faucet in the laundry room had been leaking for weeks. Slow, consistent, an off-beat metronome tapping out the things he hadn’t gotten around to. Kyle didn’t mind it anymore. The drip kept him company when the house got too quiet. He sat at the kitchen table in his work boots, eating a bowl of cornflakes gone soft. It was nearly noon, and the sun cut a sharp line across the floor. He stared at the wall beside the fridge, where the paint peeled like bark. He could fix it. He had the tools.

It’s 1:17 a.m., and I’m sitting on the floor of my kitchen drinking Dr Pepper Blackberry out of the can like it’s medicine for a heartbreak I haven’t earned yet. I haven’t cried today, but I can feel it coming, crouched behind my molars. This beverage might be the gateway. The label promises “Delightfully Dark. Subtly Sweet,” which, coincidentally, is also how I described myself during a short-lived phase in college when I tried to brand myself as “the mysterious girl who reads Bukowski and wear...

I find the disc at the bottom of the glove box, under expired insurance cards and a pen that will never write again. The paper sleeve says KAYLA’S SUMMER MIX <3 in blue Sharpie. The ink has bled, the edges curled by heat. The car smells like sunscreen and coconut lotion that never leaves Florida upholstery. I slide the mixed CD into the stereo. The screen glows TRACK 01. The first guitar riff bursts through the speakers, and the years fold back. We were seventeen, working at the Flamingo Inn off the highway and swimming on our days off. Milo burned songs on his family’s desktop through LimeWire, watching the download bars crawl forward while pop-ups blinked in the corners. We believed a summer could live inside a plastic circle. He lifted the disc to the kitchen light and watched the dye flash green and purple. He said a good mix begins with a sprint. Track 01: “Mr. Brightside” — The Killers (2004)

The morning feels ordinary. A breeze rattles the windows of the houses along Hermosa Beach. Bacon smoke drifts from a cottage kitchen and mingles with the briny air. Farther down the shoreline, gulls wheel overhead, their cries sharp, almost mocking, puncturing the stillness of the day. The tide hums against the sand with steady rhythm, a sound so constant that no one listens anymore. Two children run ahead, small shadows flickering across the bright sand. Sarah, the older sister, sprints with her braids flying, her voice ringing with excitement. Her younger brother, Michael, stumbles after her with the clumsy confidence of nineteen months. He nearly falls once, catches himself, then erupts into laughter. Their giggles float above the surf like a fragile net trying to hold the morning together.

At night, when the house settles into its own quiet, I open YouTube and visit the dead. A man with a calm voice walks through a cemetery in Los Angeles, his camera steady as he points to the names carved in marble. The title reads Hollywood Graveyard: Legends of Old Hollywood. I know his rhythm by now: the slow pan to a headstone, the hum of birds, the trimmed grass that looks almost staged.I started watching in 2020 during the pandemic, when the world blurred between headlines and hospital coun...

The story begins, as so many legends do, around a table. Ernest Hemingway, the tale goes, was sitting with fellow writers in a bar or restaurant when he made a wager. For ten dollars from each of them, he claimed he could write a complete story in only six words. Hemingway scribbled on a napkin and passed it around: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. The others, the story goes, paid up.Historians and critics still argue about whether the event ever happened, or whether Hemingway even wrote those...

The crunching of crispy pine needles beneath my sneakers echoed among the trees. As I trekked through the small, wooded lot beside our home, my older sister, Donna, gripped the chains of her seat swing. She was completely oblivious to her surroundings, which included my random bursts of singing. Her legs dangled above the scuffed grass while she swayed back and forth. The Walkman cassette player clipped to her jeans pocket blared a Stevie Nicks song about white doves. Mom had instructed Donna to watch me that day while she worked yet another twelve-hour shift at Hollywood Memorial Hospital. Donna huffed and whined as usual. She claimed to have more important things to do than watch her obnoxious younger sister. “Mom, I’m almost twelve,” I said as my cheeks reddened from a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “I don’t need a babysitter!”

WHEN I WAS five years old, my elementary school held an assembly that included a special visitor, Harry the Habit Kicker. (Harry was actually our school resource officer in a giant bear costume.) He wore a shirt that read SAY NO TO DRUGS, and he carried a white bag with BAD STUFF scrawled across it. Harry demonstrated the consequences of drugs by placing the bag into his mouth. We all watched in horror as he jumped around, waving his fuzzy arms frantically, then fell to the floor, dead.

It’s difficult to devote your life to a family that will never embrace you fully. Especially when your newly acquired family, by law, constantly expects utter devotion. Such was the case for Mrs. Mary Louise Elmwood, a young woman from a highly respected family in northern Alabama. It was a fine match; a proper combination between two well-off esteemed families. Mr. Robert Elmwood, although barely thirty, had already established quite the reputation for himself as a steadfast lawyer in the newly exquisite courthouse in downtown Athens. He was a ruthless lawyer in the courtroom, who never let any criminal walk away without some legal punishment. Some said those reprimands extended outside of those halls, and into the streets of downtown Athens. But Mary Louise didn’t partake in such rumors.

There is a permanent imprint on memory when smoke infiltrates the senses. I was awaiting my cue with a few other clowns when the foul smell of burning canvas reached me. Dressed in oversized pants that were barely held up by my flimsy suspenders and an unshaven face covered in thick white paint, I called myself Weary Willie, a sad hobo clown with a permanent frown. I always got the short end of the stick, yet I never gave up. An important lesson my pa taught me and one in which I impressed on the children who came to the Ringling Circus. Had I known what was to occur that day, I wouldn’t have bothered plastering on my unhappy persona.

Pulling Up Azaleas: A cheating husband in a failed marriage blames his wife for the gun pointed at him.

Ferris wheel turning. Slow. Too slow. Lights twitch on like startled eyes. Air thick with kettle corn sweetness. Grease cooling on metal. Burnt sugar clinging to the teeth. Beneath it, the taste of pennies left too long in the mouth. Pumpkins on the judging table. Collapsing inward. Flies tracing lazy circles. The judges gone but their fingerprints still dent the softened skin. Twilight seeps like water into wool. The sky flickers between wound and fire. Ticket in my palm. Tilt-a-Whirl. Paper warm. My mother once held one here. Same month. Same fairground. Her laugh always sharper in autumn, breaking into coughs she swore were from the cold.