It was across the street, at the bottom of the hill our own house crowned, so she got all our rain whenever it rained. All the neighborhood’s rain, it seemed. It ran down the eaves, down the driveways, down the old pebble road in dozens of little gray rivers, along the cracks and plow scars, …
I found it on the subway platform at 116th Street. A piece of paper torn from another, larger piece of paper. There were items scrawled on it, numbered one through seven. The scrap was resting on the ledge, about to topple down to the rats. To that other zone, where The City’s waxy smut cakes …
I remember feeling a restlessness in my twenties and moving quite often, not always to different cities or parts of the country, sometimes just to different apartments within the same city. Usually there was a reason for moving—grad school, a job opportunity, a relationship—but not always. Sometimes it was just the sense that I was …
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 …
In a fit of New Year’s can-do-ism, Victoria promised herself she’d find love by the end of the weekend. She waited for her Friday date, sipping the lightest beer that Hound and Wolf served, which compensated with cherry flavor for what it lacked in proof. It tasted like expired children’s medicine, was impossible to drink …
The contours of the storage unit concerned the Oligarch. He had wrested a desk chair from under an ottoman and a heap of beanbags bright like succulent fruit. It must have been midmorning by then, the insulated silence of the unit a dawn chorus. He yawed and swiveled, thinking about wrinkled things—not just metal, but …
The windows in the choir room were welded shut. It was just as well; the view was all feet and dirt. Absent natural lighting, the dozen or so of us huddled under an antique fan, broken, with three flickering yellow light bulbs to read our sheet music. I was still new enough in my position …
I The position was tenure-track, the pay good. Great even, when you considered cost of living. The university would even provide a studio. Chava had never lived in the Bible Belt, the Deep South, but she was done with Boston, its frigid winters and people, this flu-like thing that she’d had for the past four …
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 …