We never went to doctors, no matter how much pain infected Mother. She hated them, feared they expedited the death of Pripyat’s abandoned people. She told me they wanted us dead. If we roamed by ourselves, they would kill us because we were contaminated. In public I was forbidden to say from where we came.
Harry cupped the back of her head to draw her to him, but she pulled away. Three boys were enough. She infuriated him by saying that once, but it was how she forced him to get a downpayment from his mother for the tract house in which they now lived, just across the highway from Trenton.
I squirmed in my chair, already halfway out of it by the time she got to me. With both arms extended, I accepted the first English language book I’d ever held. Taking delicate steps, as if I were cradling a porcelain baby doll, I tiptoed back to my desk. I set the book down carefully and opened the cover to an illustration of a light-haired, blue-eyed family with three children, Dick, Jane, and little Sally. They looked nothing like any family in my Brooklyn neighborhood. More like the ones that smiled down on us from the sun-dazzled billboards we passed on trips up to the Catskill Mountains.
We hadn’t seen Jake and Wendy in over two years, since our engagement party at the Gooney Bird. It was one hundred and thirteen degrees that day. Crippling heat for Northern California. They sat alone on the far side of the beer garden, under a …
Her tiredness was sharp and it was cutting at her but she didn’t want to sound melodramatic. She didn’t slump or lie down and she kept her complaints to a minimum. Besides, this was a choice, hers. She told herself others were just as tired …
The release chopper hovered over abandoned land, near former Philadelphia. Lucias listened to the count of the crew chief, “three,” “two,” “godspeed,” and slid out the rear hatch with a bearing of one-eighty. Twenty-two hundred hours, no moon. He flew a Powered Stealth Glider, preferred …
Donny sat in Ms. Trisler’s 4th grade class and drew the things he wanted most for Christmas. Each classmate took their turn in front of a cloudy chalkboard, construction paper in hand. They smiled and held their color-penciled wants to their chests like Honor Roll …
Mother was in tears and had been for days since Matt’s disappearance. What she hadn’t known were the real reasons why he had left in the first place. Isaac knew and kept his thoughts to himself, knowing that if he opened his mouth, his mother …
“We often put the old ways to work for cases like this, especially when we don’t get the results we want from other strategies.” He means when what they thought would work doesn’t. He put took his hands from the pockets of his white coat …
October. The slap of the blue sky overhead. Orange leaves ran along the pavement, chased by red. They crunched under the beefy soles of my school shoes; they scudded across the black leather, itching to scratch the cracked black plastic. Yet never getting there, nature …
