Xiang Yu

I watched my grandmother run her fingers across the folded business class blanket the way you’d touch something you never expected to be allowed near. “This is nice,” she whispered….

I was sixteen years old when my stepfather gave me a choice that wasn’t really a choice at all. Marry Mr. Haskett — a man nearly my father’s age who…

My name is Margaret, and I was not a good person in high school. I’ve had fifty-nine years to make peace with that sentence, and I still haven’t managed it…

I sat in a lawyer’s office across from Mrs. Rhode’s niece and waited for my name. The niece looked at me every few seconds the way people look at something…

I opened my front door because someone kept knocking, and my yard was full of pigs. Pink ones, blue ones, ceramic ones, plastic ones — they lined the porch steps…

I remember the fever more than anything else from that week. Ava had been cranky for two days — the low-grade, clingy kind of cranky that every parent learns to…

I didn’t go to my ex-husband’s wedding because I knew exactly what I would look like sitting there. I would look like the woman who lost her husband to the…

The last normal morning of my life started with a stuffed rabbit named Mr. Bun-Bun. Ava was sitting at the kitchen counter in her pink pajamas, swinging her legs the…

I was seven years old the last time I saw my mother. It was an ordinary Tuesday morning, which is the part I’ve turned over in my mind more times…