Main Dishes

They were twenty years old when the community board of Blackwood Creek decided they had to go. There was no formal hearing in the township hall. There was no written warning pinned to their cabin door. It was simply a Tuesday morning in the dead of an Alaskan January when their uncle appeared on their…

Abigail Hartwell had never aimed a musket at a human being in her thirty-six years. She did it now without a single flinch. The two children huddled behind her clung to her heavy wool skirt with such terrifying force that she could feel the violent trembling of their small bones vibrating straight through the thick…

PART 2 — FULL STORY I looked at the tarp over my husband’s ’68 Mustang and I said, “Alright, Richard. Let’s see if you were right.” The words hung in the cold, oil-scented air of the garage. Outside, the Oakland rain was drilling against the aluminum siding, and somewhere in the street, a pair of…

But the damage had already been done. The words hung suspended in the air. They didn’t hurt because they were cruel; they hurt because they were so completely, spectacularly wrong. I looked at the man I had shared a bed with for more than three decades. The father of my children. The person who, by…

FULL STORY — PART 2 The kitchen phone sat heavy in my hand after I set it down. The dial tone hummed for a second before I pressed the receiver back onto its cradle. Outside, the cicadas were already starting their evening noise. The photograph lay on the table where I’d left it—six men on…

PART 2 Miller’s face went pale, his scarred hand frozen mid-gesture over the radio. For a heartbeat, nobody on the catwalk moved. The only sounds were the muffled struggle from the dark corridor below and the distant echo of the flashbang’s concussion still ringing off the plywood walls. “Chief, that’s not a bolted dog,” Briggs…

PART 2 The violent air-shredding thump of heavy rotor blades tore through the thick humidity, drowning out every other sound in the universe. I felt the vibration travel up through the dry fescue grass, through the worn rubber soles of my sneakers, straight into my bones. It was a frequency I knew better than my…

PART 2 “Crew engineer, we’ve got a problem with the load plan,” Chief Master Sergeant Ferlanden’s voice crackled over the secure channel. I could hear the background noise of the cargo bay behind his words, the clanking of heavy metal chains and the shuffling of boots. “Total casualties just went to forty. We need to…

PART 2 The Admiral’s massive hand, which had been cutting off the circulation to my arm just moments before, suddenly went completely slack. His fingers uncurled, dropping to his side as if the fabric of my black mourning dress had suddenly caught fire. The booming, authoritative voice that had just echoed through the vaulted ceilings…