Alex’s hair was beginning to gray at the nape of his neck and he tired after walking up only two flights of stairs. I teased him about these facts only to deflect responsibility.
With every stroke of the pen or tap of the keyboard, I could feel energy pooling in my fingertips. Late at night, I’d touch Alex’s shoulder and feel its frailty, my fingers pressing down and feeling only bone.
Amy first realized something was amiss in the third grade. There she was one minute, staring out of the window, thinking about the blueness of her classmate Jonah’s eyes, when suddenly a week had passed.
It always happened like that. She would lose herself in a daydream and then lose herself in real life. She’d imagine a comet hurtling towards the earth, laying waste to the school, then wake up a day later
Ashley Burnett's last piece for The Toast was about a superhero breakup. My husband was too far away to hear me, but I said it anyway: “I don’t think we should knock.” I watched him as he stumbled through the tall grass, past the gilded gates that led up to the mansion. I hurried after him, but didn’t run, and kept near the lime trees that lined the path. My nose stung with their…
He left me where he found me: the balcony of my mother’s apartment with the smell of adobo wafting in from the windows above, my sneakered feet dangling off the edge. His cape fluttered in the breeze and disappeared over the apartment building across the street, its jagged hem just barely missing a satellite dish.
*
The first headline I saw was by accident. My mother had sent me
