2025, Regal House

The City Beneath Her: a Novel

"A fingerprint is made up of whorls and arches, the detective explained. See the friction edge? This is the radial loop, the peacock's eye--"

How the Sugar Looks Before It Disappears

"We wait outside in our poly-cotton spun outfits for the cake factory to open, looking at our phones, wearing white paper sailboat hats, thinking: Who loves me—just a little. Drifting over the sea of likes, our fingers in loose, clear gloves."

Paul Finds Himself in Miniature

"But Kay is still regular-sized, asleep in their bed as big as the sea, the raft of her breath carrying her away while Paul jumps to the nightstand, hooks his legs and shimmies down into the rough forest of carpet. He will escape the house—find a corner where rain has made the dead rot of plaster soft in his hands, or a crack beneath the door large enough for a mouse to slip through."

Ever-After

"Weirdly, you become an egg. No shell. Hard boiled."

Sugaring

"Light from distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us. We see these galaxies not as they are now, but as they were long ago."

Resuscitation

"A man swims to the left of Julia, and a woman to the right. They are blurs of misted goggles, the glint of a silver, latex cap. They flip like sleek fish at the pool’s wall."

I Made a Hologram

"The first hologram I made was of a tree. I thought of you as I made it, and how you said it’s hard to remember what a summer tree looks like in the middle of winter."

1975

"The dining room ceiling in the empty house on Howard Road is stained Benson & Hedges brown, a shape of blooming flowers patterned like the Woodward & Lothrop dresses the once-married women wear when meeting a date on the Kennedy Center terrace."

Memo

"On the flight to Argentina, he wore a pressed pink shirt."

Reflection

"I stood sideways in front of the mirror, smoothing my dress."

How to Be a Ghost

"Try this with the brown glass bottle."

Already Later

"The women who took shifts caring for Margaret wore tulip-pink scrubs, cardigans, and round-toed shoes that squeaked on the polished floors beyond her room."

Skeleton Crew

"There are places where everyone wants to buy a house, but that’s not here. We have empty subdivisions. We have coyote in broad daylight. Our hospital is flying at half-mast. This used to be a steel town. Slag pits line the highway. The sun sets behind mountains of shattered stone."

Playlist

"When my friend’s husband died, it was March—that last cold streak of winter rain—and we opened all the windows in her apartment so the wind could rush through the rooms."

A Girl Like You

"May took the trolley to the new grocer’s—the one on the boulevard with shining white aisles where the exit was near the back of the store on an otherwise blank wall past the butcher’s station, which smelled of bleach and blood, where married women or their maids ordered a cow’s flank and watched as the butcher hacked at it with his great cleaver."

You're Out of the Night

"On Match.com, Ken’s moniker was “Dull.” He wrote that among his favorite things were office carpeting, spam, and waiting rooms."

2016, Regan Arts

The Singing Bone: a Novel

"The package lies on the kitchen table. Hans Loomis keeps his back to it, preferring instead to linger at the window, absorbing the final heavy days of summer—those long evenings when the nature of time shifts into something dreamlike, suspended. "

The Twenty-Third of June

"Two nights pass, and on the third day, beyond the smudged train window, we wake to green hills and the sun moving high."