She was far past the point of wanting to simply sit down and cry. It felt almost as if she had missed the gap in her resolve that would have…

He took as deep a breath as he could hold, as deep and sound as ever, it seemed, and shone the penlight into the hole again. Holding his side with…

“There,” one of them pointed, leaning precariously far from the edge of the slanted roof. “Right there.” The other stayed sensibly seated, squinting at a horizon that looked no different…

It felt silly to even think such a thing, but it was true, wasn’t it? The skies hadn’t been clear since they had started building that church. Almost three months…

It was just down the hall. Thirty seconds at a dead sprint, and he could be safe. She had already gone. Almost three hours ago, and he had listened with…

“It’s not right,” she said, as he tore another page from the book and began folding it into the tiny square that would make it easiest to swallow. “Of course…

The sun still seemed to move behind the glassy heavens sometimes, searching bleakly through the blue as if it, too, had lost something it couldn’t give up on trying to…

She didn’t move when he sat down beside her. The breeze blew smoke from the tip of her cigarette in her place. It stirred her hair, or he might have…

Nothing is safer than a pearl in a hailstorm. She’d never understood the phrase, until the plague had come and, with it, the rats, and suddenly they’d seemed to be…