A thing I like about finger painting is the feeling of the goo on my fingers. Paint brushes feel too much like pencils, which remind me of how messy my handwriting is and how judgmental my teachers were about that. I never really liked to write anyway. Words constrain me, even paint brushes constrain me.…

“Hey everyone, Harry here at the tent city seeing if I can find someone who’s hungry.” The voice was coming from behind the view, as the camera view itself bounced along to the pace of the speaker’s walking. “I stopped at City Lights Deli and picked up a bag full of sandwiches. They didn’t want…

Okay, so, I was in fourth grade, so that was like… 1979? I think? I was in the special education room because I was prone to meltdowns in school, some really violent ones, throwing things, screaming, that sort of thing. They’d given me an EI IEP… that stands for Emotionally Impaired. These days I probably…

“This is Jenny. She’s a little shy.” Jenny was aware that her mother was talking, addressing another adult in this new school that she was apparently supposed to attend now. Her family had moved across two states. In October. Apparently because her father had found his Dream Job, and so they’d had to move from…

“The thing is, I’ll never know if you really like my cooking.” I was standing over the stove, slowly stirring a pot of marinara sauce. “I do. I’ve said I do.” Miranda was sitting on the counter next to me, swinging her legs forward and letting them hit the dishwasher lightly before swinging them again.…

1 Michael didn’t like this. He was watching out the car window and rocking gently. This was not like the streets of home. His city was small, and he knew most of the streets, and this was a big road that wasn’t like that. His father was driving the car. His father looked very nervous,…

Had they come in through the window? Veronica was certain that she’d locked it last night, but this morning it was open, just a crack. Had she forgotten to lock it? Had a memory lapse allowed them in? Or maybe they had already been in the closet. Veronica’s eldest, Jase, had warned her about that.…

“My favorite movie? Well, that’s a difficult question. My favorite genre is sci-fi fantasy, so the easy answer would be Star Wars. The first one, which was only renamed ‘A New Hope’ in later releases. But if we’re honest, despite the way that it was a cultural phenomenon and a special fx powerhouse, it was…

Jessamyn sat on a bench in the middle of the city park, having counted the cement blocks it had taken to get from the curb next to the lot where she’d parked the car to the bench she was on now (twelve). The path was curved, bordered on either side by neatly manicured grass that…