Main Dishes

The cold shadow of Richard, the neighborhood HOA president, fell over me before I even heard his expensive leather shoes crunching on the gravel. I was kneeling in the damp mulch, sweat stinging my eyes as I planted the last row of hydrangeas outside the clubhouse. I wiped the wet, coarse dirt from my palms,…

Part 2 The fluorescent ballast gave one last electric sigh before the office fell into a humming quiet that seemed to press against my eardrums. I kept the black titanium key fob flat on the desk between us, my thumb still resting on the single unmarked button. Outside the glass walls, the showroom floor had…

The silence in the lobby had shifted. It was no longer the quiet of public embarrassment; it was the tense, vibrating stillness that precedes a detonation. The older man, whose brass nameplate read Harold Benner, Branch Manager, didn’t look at Vance. He didn’t look at the tellers who were pretending to type on their keyboards….

“The land doesn’t care how much money you spend or how important you think you are. The records say what the records say.” The smell of fresh asphalt and expensive cologne mixed with the dry Texas dust as I stood near the entrance of the brand new $9 million Cedar Crown clubhouse. Dozens of luxury…

PART 2 — FULL STORY The clubhouse door sighed shut behind me, and the cold Wisconsin night swallowed the last trace of Carolyn Whitaker’s perfume. I stood in the gravel parking lot for a long minute, breathing steam into the darkness, the $3,800 invoice crumpled in my fist. The paper felt greasy, as if the…

PART 2 — FULL STORY I peeled off my socks. The cold mat hit my bare, pale feet. The rubber was new, dense enough that my arches registered every seam beneath them, but the chill was the same kind of cold that had lived in my bones since a rain-soaked jungle five decades gone. My…

“That cheap piece of metal won’t make you any less of a failure,” he sneered, tossing my coin into the dirty puddle. The harsh fluorescent lights of the trauma ward always made the bleach in my mop bucket smell like burning ozone. I was just trying to finish my shift. Three more hours, and I’d…

“I survived a war zone, but the coldest monster I ever met was wearing pearls and calling me ‘Mom’.” The rhythmic, metallic beeping of the heart monitor felt entirely too slow in the freezing, over-air-conditioned guest room of my son’s massive Texas home. I stood in the corner in my grease-stained diner uniform, my jaw…

“Do not embarrass me by acting like the cheap diner waitress you are,” he hissed. The icy condensation from my water glass dripped onto my forty-five-dollar thrift-store dress as I pressed myself deeper into the shadows of the Dallas ballroom. I gripped the heavy silver chain hidden beneath my collar, my jaw tight and my…

[PART 2] The salute. I saw it through the canopy glass, a little warped by the heat and the vibration. Colonel Vance stood at the nose of the Apache with his hand rigid against the brim of his cap, and he didn’t move. The wind from the rotors was tearing at his uniform, whipping his…