Carmen Maria Machado

Two years pass, and my family notices I am missing. The bearer is wearing my dress, and lights a cigarette. She smirks a lot, smokes a never-ending chain of cigarettes, and one day says her first...

We gathered for the last time in October at Luna's house, where the living room was gorgeous, an eclectic blend of dark wood and strange artifacts. After the shooting at Brandywine High School, the...

Two sisters lived in a courtyard surrounded by a tall stone wall. One day, the king heard their lilting voices and ambled his way to a small gap in the mortar, where he bit down on a finger and...

I am in Chicago, in dark tunnels, meeting up with a girl I know from high school who I haven't seen in five years. She shows me her apartment, which smells like turpentine and has high ceilings and...

Mama did not talk about her journey west very much, but she described it like a painting she was viewing through a fever. Before the light left her, we lived on a patch of prairie, and every season...

Two months into my time as Fred and Elsie's ghost, they wake up to find me at the kitchen table, staring at the Ouija board unfolded over the unfinished pine. They ask me to talk to them, and I...

Cara kisses the baby on the ear and hands it to me. The baby curls her head against my breasts, but doesn't cry. A woman in a cummerbund swept by me and we went to the Brooklyn Museum where I...

Dr. U is inside me, talking to a nurse about her vacation to Chile, and I waded through two feet of snow on a silent street. I don't remember getting fat, but I had a baby and a difficult,...

The strangeness fed our discontent.

A newly-married wife holds on to the only secret she feels she has left—a mystery her increasingly insidious husband is desperate to unravel.