She laid her head back against the lumpy, over-used pillow, trying not to think about how many people had died before her in this very same bed, on this very same pillow, sadly gazing at these same yellowed walls.

It was getting difficult to keep her eyes open; she could feel the weight of her body slipping away, but she wasn't afraid. No, she wasn't afraid anymore.

She knew what was coming, and if the medication she was on would allow for it, she'd salivate at the thought of…

“Hey Mom, what did you decide to do with your day off from work?”

“You probably don’t really want to know (giggle, giggle).”

 …

Dear husband, as I lay here dying, I'm running through the laundry list of things that you'll need to take care of after I'm gone and...ooh, add laundry to the list, and don't forget the fabric softener!

First, be sure to hug and kiss our boy at least once every day for me, and be sure to tell him it's from his mama.

Second, don't leave Sagey to fend for herself with those crazy people (and no, I don't mean my parents)!

Third, but seriously, speaking of my parents,…

..........

“I almost died three times, you know…” he said, and I turned to look at him. “Yes, I did, too.  The first time, I fell out of my cot.  The second time, I was run over by a car.  The third time, the neighbours’ pit-bulls mauled me so badly the parents decided to switch off the life-support system, after I’d spent a week in hospital.”

I noticed his quaint use of the word “the” with ‘parents’ – but I didn’t comment.  This child would give Charles…

.................

And then, it began.

The key would jam in the lock, and when I opened the door, I would hear footsteps sprinting toward the veranda. The curtain would move slightly, and then…nothing. I always kept the entrance and balcony doors locked, so nobody could have come in from either of them.

I would smell cinnamon and cloves. The next day it would be lavender. The day after it would be tea rose.

............

read…

.................

And then, it began.

The key would jam in the lock, and when I opened the door, I would hear footsteps sprinting toward the veranda. The curtain would move slightly, and then…nothing. I always kept the entrance and balcony doors locked, so nobody could have come in from either of them.

I would smell cinnamon and cloves. The next day it would be lavender. The day after it would be tea rose.

............

read…

Curt Broger joined the union when he was 21, which was a big deal because a union job meant his hourly wage was several times the average in that town for what was, by pretty much anyone's standard, unskilled work;  by the time he was twenty-three he had grown a beard, a T-shirt-banded gut and wore a Local-71 overjacket with the demeanor of a man who didn't give a damn for a world dressed otherwise. So that morning after he dropped its tiny hex screw, he didn't even think about options but…

Oscar's was one of those skeevy bars where men with broken nose capillaries drink. Oscar was the first bar owner in the Twin Cities to ban smoking on the premises -- in 1982, it was -- and when his clientele threatened to boycott, he slashed the price of a draft beer to 25 cents and threatened right back to ban every last one of them. Business never dropped off, the cost of a beer went back up to a buck, and Oscar saved his lungs a couple decade's worth of…

Mathilda (Mattie) Fluker died on her Ethan Allen living room sofa in the middle of episode 417 of The Young and The Restless, fully clothed, upright, and in full possession of her senses. Next to her on an early-American reproduction side table sat her afternoon glass of sweet tea, a battalion of vitamin bottles and a TV Guide opened to an article about Ryan Seacrest’s new $40 million mansion.

None of these caused Mattie’s…

A quick on-line search for headlines pertinent to the above picks out the following: Toddler drowns in Esporta health club swimming pool; Beaumont baby dies days after falling into pool;Baby dies after left by father in hot vehicle; Two Babies Left Home Alone Die In Fire; and many more.

Only yesterday, indeed, the British press reported that a five-month-old baby taken to hospital after his pram plunged into the River Thames.

All of us make mistakes…

Wade Harmon died Saturday, driving his John Deere eastward on the back forty. The tractor idled until it ran out of fuel, and when he didn't come in for lunch, Mavis walked outside and saw it, green and yellow standing out against the long, brown prairie furrows.

She ran to him, but there was no diesel left in the tank with which to carry him home.

My Betty went to their house the next morning with egg-and-bacon casserole and fresh biscuits.  They'd laid Wade out in the parlor on…

C.S Lewis once said that no one ever told him that grief felt so much like fear. What C.S Lewis also was not told was that grief is chest pain and short breaths and great, big wailing. Grief is the tightness of the throat. And grief is barely bearable - I feel like I'm dying too, I'm drowning with thoughts of him and thingsIshouldhavedone and thingsIcouldhavedonebetter.…

I woke to gun shots, shots from a large gun and far too many shots, all sounding from about 10 feet from the bed where my husband and I nest every evening.  I rolled out of the now empty nest to find out what the hell he was shooting at while the sky was still in shades of pink and I was looking forward to the cool breeze floating through the lace curtains to caress us while we had a rare chance to sleep beyond 5:30.  “Fuckers”, he said aiming down the barrel to where my eyes followed to the…

Dying wasn’t the worst thing that happened to Lily that Monday morning, though it was the last.

Arriving at her desk with last night’s recycled “leftover surprise” still threatening to recycle itself once more, she quickly sensed something not quite right in the office– the lethal glares from her supervisor and several coworkers, was the tip-off– and the unpleasant thought began to form in her muddled mind that those alcohol-induced rants she’d posted on facebook for a few thousand of…

You might have read about her in the papers or heard it on the evening news. We weren't surprised, of course, not after years of blackouts and strange late night phone calls.

John coined a name for the long incoherent rants and accusations she posted on line while

drunk: "Shit-facebooking."

She blamed her situation on everyone around her and everyone who'd ever done her wrong, from a Daddy who ditched his wife…

He left her on a bright morning when the air outside tasted like cool water but, in her room, she slept on, her hair tumbling in a loose train across the pillow. The twisted braid of lilies woven in her amber hair last night were now limp in the stale humming air. Her lips looked dry but he remembered them as, his mind had almost vocalized the word, moist. He had brushed a single strand away from her mouth as if its touch might…

I’d succeeded, poorly, with the shorthand typing but failed the OND in Business Studies because we so terrorised the brand new Economic Geography teacher that he took his revenge by failing the lot of us, (history does not record whether he failed in his career as a result).   I’d earned opprobrium by announcing my next step would be marriage – then I…

November crows in the line of trees behind, nests overcrowded by the loss of one felled prematurely, crashing, crushing through the roof, rendering it beyond repair.    Monochrome, except black with red not white ... the red near brown the colour of dried ... no do not go there.   One end still standing, corner struts supporting despite the sagging centre where the shelter is no more, reduced to emptiness, no longer able to…

She was tired of the anecdotes, tired of the 'funny stories', tired of the countless recollections of The Good Times.  Above all,  she was tired of steeling herself for the benefit of family.   Bursting into the bathroom, she swiftly threw the lock and gazed at her sad, sunken reflection in the gold framed mirror over the sink. The levee strained, bulged, and finally broke, silent sobs streaming tears down her sullen cheeks, streaking her…

He sat at the table watching her covertly as they ate the dinner she had painstakingly prepared.

  She was a good woman, not bad looking, a bit dishevelled at the moment after scurrying around in the kitchen because this was one of those days when she'd left everything too late.  He felt annoyance rising in him and stared down at his plate, concentrating on the food arranged within the circle, a circle that reminded him of the ring on his finger that too often these days felt…