Sadie says we’re roommates. She says she loves me, and it’s fine otherwise, but that we’re just two people living together — we share a house and we share a bed but we come and go like roommates. “There’s no passion anymore,” Sadie says, the way she gets when she’s…

The call came early in the morning, impossibly, ungodly, early, with the sudden shrill ringing of the phone first echoing in my dream, whatever I was dreaming about, and then piercing the stillness of the bedroom. I opened my eyes, blinked to focus, to see Ashley sound asleep next to…

Sadie keeps a postcard of Key West on her desk, propped against her computer, among her Post-it Note reminders, and a dog-eared copy of the company directory, IT’s extension highlighted and underlined and starred, and the green rubber stress ball with the crooked smiley face she got at that trade…

It’s that standing appointment you have, when you find yourself sitting across from your therapist, those doe eyes, pursed lips, expressionless, with her flowery cardigan and placid disposition, in her suburban office in a converted townhouse in the East End that reeks of potpourri and scented candles, littered with overstuffed…

It’s Christmas Eve, and you’re high on oxy, lying flattened on the floor in the middle of the living room, legs straight, arms stretched, staring up at nothing, frozen in this moment, lights out, shades pulled, in the dark and quiet, only the listless flicker from the last glowing…

It was Thanksgiving afternoon and a line had already formed in front of Lilabelle Durham’s upscale boutique in Poplar Square for her first ever Black Friday Sale that was set to begin at midnight. Thanks to Lilabelle’s extensive marketing efforts (she had taken an online marketing course over the summer)…

It was the third Saturday in August, and the Birchmont Village Potato Festival was in full swing, having been resurrected after an unimaginable seventy-year absence by Hank Walters Bryant, the ranking member of the Birchmont Village council and devotee of all things spud. Hank had happened upon a write-up touting…

Sometimes you see that girl across a crowded room, and your eyes meet, and in an instant time stands still, and you’re lifted slightly lighter on the inside, and the weight of the world slips from your shoulders, and you stand a little straighter, a little bolder, and you forget…

Against perhaps her better judgment, my wife bought me a skateboard for Christmas this year. It was not without some consternation and deliberation on her part, along with my repeated assurances that I wasn’t going to break my neck. “I used to skateboard all the time,” I told her. “My…