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No question what her favourite flavour was. Black cherry. The Food City store brand. Julietta would always remember that nearly nondescript, primer-grey can with the maroon letters that spelled out BLACK CHERRY SODA, the words set at a forty-five-degree angle. She only ever drank the stuff in the

Sally locked the door hastily and darted into the alley flanking her gift shop. Because there she was again. Her new neighbour. What was she doing, wafting about the village at five o’clock on a rainy evening in February? Almost certainly yet another import from London, newly-ensconced in what sho

A woman drives through woods in winter. On either side of the car, tall trees stand and sulk, resisting winter’s demise at the year’s turn. The woman is scared. She is the fifth carer for the old man, and no one has told her why. But she’s heard the stories and she is afraid. It’s New Yea

After a night in Rome the four of them rent a Fiat, and with Willie behind the wheel they head north on the via Aurelia. While gray clouds threaten rain at first, half an hour later they thin and as they near Cerveteri the sky turns blue and the sun shines bright. In the passenger's seat, Anne si

I remember how I was coming out of university: lofty, strong ideals, but incredibly lazy. I read a lot, got into long-winded discussions with no definite conclusion and generally loafed about. At university you could do all this with impunity but now that I’d left it was frowned upon, and being kn

We pull in front of the half-lit Walmart sign, the first ‘A’ flashing like a strobe and the ‘L’ out entirely. There are abandoned shopping carts strewn haphazardly across the front entrance in the night breeze, lonely and forgotten by whatever poor employee got stuck with the night shift; my

Six minutes and thirty-three seconds. That was the amount of time it took a spark to wind its way down and around the forty-inch fuses attached to the nine cherry-red two-stick dynamite charges that Frank Rasmussen was carrying in his dusty leather satchel. Frank had been excavating mines long enoug

Kimi broke sticks just for the fun of hearing them crack. Dry sticks, thick as the fingers of old men and crooked and brittle. And she’d tread on them in the wood or flex them in her hands or across her knee, and the sound of them breaking was like small gunfire. Everything quiet then and all the