Darkness descended on the denizens of Providence one brutally hot evening in mid-July for approximately seventy-two minutes during a city-wide blackout. While some of it may have spilled over into the neighboring towns of Cranston and Pawtucket, it remained tightly within city limits, affecting every neighborhood, side street and main thoroughfare. Experts would later attribute […]
Jenny Wood, the narrator of “Remember Me, Remember Me,” is a ghost who died at age three and developed the ability to absorb the memories of other ghosts, gathering into herself interior worlds she would never have otherwise encountered. At one point in my afterlife I roamed from one Little Free Library to another. Many […]
Growing up, I was a boy. At least, that’s what they told me. Life was presented in binary code. Parents and teachers weren’t like us. “No, they’re adults! Y’all’re children. Boys are boys and girls are girls.” — whatever that means. “But there is a difference! Boys wear blue and girls wear pink. Boys are […]
Naomi sought a bruja to cast a spell; her name was Flor and she was a neighborhood witch who served the locals with Santeria. Naomi was there for a standard service, on behalf of jilted lovers everywhere. She wanted her ex to remember her, forever. He had broken up with her abruptly just two months […]
Oscar and Marcus were born to be rivals, it seemed, from the age of four when they shared the same babysitter. It started with a coveted crayon, color green, and it continued into the drab halls of Gilbert Stuart Middle School. It didn’t help matters that they were practically neighbors, coming of age on the […]
*Rule Number One is that you gotta have fun. But when you’re done, you gotta be the first torun.” “Rule Number two, just don’t get attached to somebody you could lose.” “Two to a bunker each, and don’t forget your registered wristband!” Emerald could feel her heart pounding in her chest as she followed her […]
Leo hated taking flag down fares; it was the sheer unpredictability of how the ride could turn out that made him anxious. This was not New York, where a partition separated driver from customer. This was PVD, where because of simple proximity, a fare was privy to your world, and vice versa, for however long […]
Everyone in Providence knows about Piazza di Amore, the small Italian restaurant tucked away on a side street off Federal Hill. It’s not one of the big places with valet parking and red neon signs promising “authentic” pasta. It doesn’t even have a sign outside — just a single old-fashioned style lantern, twinkling above a […]
Evie’s friends had bailed on her, so she drank alone. Ned was bartending, but his heady personality required a buffer to manage his conspiratorial rants. Evie didn’t have the energy. A conversation with Ned would only compound her sense of abandonment. She wasn’t ready to discuss the physics of his recent obsession: An earth-killing meteor […]
Merciless1 I think I understand Victor Frankenstein now that I am older He was lonely and so created his monster for companionship without knowing it was going to appear monstrous. I, too, did the same thing but with myself to cover my own loneliness without knowing that I too now appear monstrous There was this […]