books
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The woman in Jackson Square told me I had brought someone with me. I smiled. Of course I had. He had been with me for years. New Orleans was sweating through midnight, all perfume and rot beneath the balconies. Rain still glistened between the bricks. Somewhere down Chartres Street, a trumpet was playing something slow…
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The room had fourteen cracks in the ceiling. There had been thirteen yesterday. He was almost certain of that. He lay perfectly still beneath the gray wool blanket and studied the newest one, a thin black vein beginning above the window and traveling toward the light fixture before disappearing beneath a blister of old paint.…
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The road had no name, which was probably why she trusted it. Named things came with expectations. Destinations. Promises. Graves. She had learned enough about all four. She left before sunrise with one bag, half a tank of gas, and nothing in the back seat worth turning around for. For the first hundred miles, she…
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The knock came before sunrise. Three slow strikes against the door. Not desperate. Official. The woman inside was already awake. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of something that had gone cold hours ago, listening to the wind scrape branches against the roof. The knock came again. She did not…
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Before they called her dangerous, they called her divine. That is the part of the story they tend to leave out. Before there were warnings whispered about women who knew too much, there were women people traveled miles to find. Women who understood the moon before anyone bothered naming its phases. Women who knew which…
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Some people are merely reading the chapters of their life as they are exposed, not everyone can be a writer. There is something unsettling about realizing you have been holding the book upside down. You thought the blank pages meant you were supposed to fill them. You thought the pen belonged to you. It never…
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By the time she found the old tattoo artist, the waiting list had become a legend. Some said he had retired years ago. Others swore he simply stopped accepting people who wanted decoration instead of direction. He never asked what someone wanted. He asked why. There was a difference. The walls around his chair were…
