Cecily could still hear the little fan whirring, a sound that somehow underscored the silence that morning, if she thought long and hard enough about it. For all but the coldest months in the last year, Claudia had kept it going on a small fern stand next to her reading chair, more or less in … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 9.7.20

It was twilight and Cecily’s bones ached. She stepped off the city bus and began the short walk to the home she shared with her mother, whose health had spiraled into a steady decline in the last year or so. She turned the key in the front door lockset and stepped inside quietly to the … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 8.2.20

Bran’s bedroom was all that remained to suggest the original vernacular architecture of her little cottage—the rest she had dragged grudgingly into the 1970s. A pair of authentic-looking casement windows just above the bed had convinced Lucy this might be true, anyway: They were large and lacked mullions, with handwrought iron fasteners that worked surprisingly … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 7.19.20

Lucy lay sprawled on the floor of the capacious family room absorbed in her artwork, drawing on an enormous white tablet with a collection of graphite pencils scattered about, and the tin that held them at her elbow. She rubbed lines here and there with the outside edge of her hand to soften them, the … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 3.15.20

However pointless Cessily deemed fussing over an empty house, mopping and dusting rooms missing their people, making and remaking already made up beds, she remained as grateful for the work. She could hear her elder coworkers in the butler’s pantry, a man and woman in servitude to this family long before Cessily arrived there. On … Continue reading Fresh Fiction: Monday Afternoon Miniature