Fiction

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Listen to Alice McCormick read “Follow the Signs”: Eons ago, when I was young, my family and I went yard sale-ing. That was what we called it. We started about Memorial Day and finished about Labor Day. On clear, sunny Saturday mornings when the hot dew boiled off the fresh lawns, all four of us …

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I It was three days after Christmas when I came home from work and found the gift bag leaning up against my door. “Love, Aunt Gloria,” read the card in her spidery cursive script, the kind that stymied children. I pulled a tin of cheap mint chocolates from the bag. Frango was stamped in bloodred …

Winner of the 2024 Robert and Adele Schiff Award in fiction At night I kept my Jesus folded small in the corner of my closet, arms under tucked knees, dark mangled locks beneath the cotton dangle of buttoned shirts I didn’t wear. That’s where I charged him too. Anywhere out in my room would have …

In the days following the tragedy, after the funerals were over and even the local papers had moved on to other stories, Albert stopped leaving the house. For a couple days he put on a performance for his father, who was on bereavement leave from the university, where he was a professor on the history …

On the night of the break-in, I was upstairs painting my daughter’s bedroom. I hoped Erin would see it as a surprise, a kindness, but with kids, you never know. The week before she’d asked us to paint her room ocean blue, and I’d said that was too dark a color, that she’d regret it, …