We are the family of everyone who means us no harm, whatever the results of what they do. We love Pizza Friday, snow days, and getting into pajamas in the afternoon when we’ve spent the day at the beach. In fact, Gallagher-von-Durfeldom heaven is a...

—Nevertheless you did kill him? —I was present at his death. —Present with a knife. —Mine was not the only hand on that knife. —You left the young men below? —As we often had before. —And took your son up the mountain alone? —As...

I had no magic as a child. I would have used it if I had, to stop the Boots from kicking me where I hid. Flat against the bedroom floor with the floor of the sky just inches above my nose, I knew no safer, more anonymous place to be, but even so...

In photos of my daughter’s wedding, I look thinner than I was and not at all as if I wanted to strangle the groom. There stands Sheila, radiant as always against a bank of pallbearer suits. Looking back over her shoulder, she lures the eye with one...

They looked married. In what they took for granted, the other riders saw they had been together forever. He read the map of the system posted by the door, tilting his head to follow the lines, and kept his balance with a hand on the pole. She clung to...