Rosa can hear the telltale rumble of the van pulling away from the entryway. Wheels snap over fallen branches, the machine lurching as it strains to make its way back onto the main road. She knows without looking that its precious cargo is sitting in neat boxes outside the door. Multicolored serums, plastic syringes, needles …
Continue reading All That Is Calm and Bright / byAmber Gallant
Rain had fallen in steady sheets for two weeks straight, so the sun peeking out from behind the clouds in a dazzling sunset made for an especially ethereal Friday afternoon. From behind the bar counter, Jaime watched in shadow as the bloom of late autumn light painted the nimbus-quilted sky nectarine colors; just outside, a …
The flight to Seattle, then Vancouver, had passed in a blur. Sophie had been pleasantly surprised when the airline assigned her a window seat in an exit row, and spent the entire flight staring at the earth from above. The desert mountains of Los Angeles gave way to hills covered with unbroken expanses of fir. …
Sitting with a nearly empty popcorn bag in one hand, Miguel gazed into a crowd of eager city pigeons. Their heads bobbed incessantly, mulling around in disparate circles. He tossed a handful of popcorn and watched as a flurry of grey-green feathers descended on the scattered kernels. He slapped the butter-grease on his fingers over …
Downstairs, her sister Helen and brother-in-law Richard were talking about her again. “Serena said she could take Emilie out to the Marden exhibition today. The one I recommended to her, you remember? From the Reader. I have a couple of errands to run. You think Serena can manage that, right? Richard laughed. “Sure. They’re perfect …
On Friday Amy Glaston left the house for a drive. It was the time of day which sat right between rush hours, but when she reached the freeway the onramp was crowded with a three car pile-up and a row of rubberneckers that set her back. For the past nine months on Fridays she had …
For months afterward, everyone asked you where you were the night that the birds flew over the town. They blacked out the sky and filled the streets of tranquil neighborhoods with a husky warble that coalesced into a great monotonous drone. In the morning there was more than one telephone line down across the city. …
By the time Robby’s parents arrived at the school most of the heavier rain clouds had been pushed to the horizon, encircling the world like the rim of a fishbowl. It was the end of Robby’s first week at the new school and it had rained every day straight since Monday. He sat alone on …
It’s getting so cold in the mornings, even with the space heaters in the house, that Emma doesn’t even want to go outside. The chill no longer creeps in. Instead, it saunters past her fleece-lined mittens and in through her pores, so that it takes half a day to free her fingers from an unaccustomed …
At three-thirty in the afternoon, the sun had attained such a point in the sky that it was now shining with absolute brutality into Isaac Jacob’s twelfth floor apartment. The mercilessly bright light revealed a room that was, in a manner of speaking, a near perfect reflection of its occupant. Strewn about the wood floor …
