Kate Ryan

One crawled up the side of the bag and opened her wings, a hardtop convertible with legs.

Alma couldn’t understand why her Yelp reviews were so dismal. She didn’t advertise herself as a magician. She was a hair stylist.

“Don’t you smash that cake in my face, or I’ll never forgive you,” she said, and she never did, not really.

Fresh orange juice, milk, thick slices of ham, a block of cheese, a carton of eggs—her husband kept it this way should this moment arrive.

She doesn’t know how to communicate the feeling that all is for nothing, nothing is normal.

Eva, having stayed up the whole night preoccupied with death and time, planned to call in sick.

She knows you’re not supposed to call it an “it,” but she honestly can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl or . . . undecided.

It was a tradition of theirs. When siblings Sue and Johnny went home to their mother’s for Christmas, they watched the 11 o’clock local news.

She gropes for attention while he dies in the other room.

My parents got the idea they’d send me to stay at my grandparents’ house in Florida for a week. I think my mother needed a week to herself.