Daisy picked up a handful of black soot from the ground and smeared it on the only remaining wall of her home, which just a week before had been beautiful and whole and the place where she had felt safe and secure. Wrong she wrote in big, bold letters and then she walked over to…

I don’t know why Gerald felt the need to lambaste me about the children in front of our visiting friends. To say it was humiliating is an understatement, particularly since I had made what seemed to me an innocuous statement. “They are spoiled,” I’d said, as if that was a surprise to anybody around that…

After Cecilia knocked on the front door of her childhood home and waited for the people who had lived there now twenty years to answer, she reached out and touched the stucco wall next to the door. It was the same beige that it had been when she was a girl and was rough to…

“Joy” “What’s that?” Joy Matthews looked up from her desk at her office mate, Connie Clements. “Very funny.” Joy knew that Connie didn’t actually think she was funny. She was the most unfunny person she knew – bordering on morose – and her name was some cosmic joke, poking endless fun at the discrepancy. Her…