She was alive in America as the end began.

She was only a child then. Her days were spent in classrooms, where the teachers didn’t talk about the food shortages or strange sickness. Her nights were spent dancing on the lawn with her mother, the blades of yellow grass prickling…

Phoebe was ten years old the first time her father ran away from home.

It was the Sunday after he’d given a sermon on the parable of the lost sheep. She always said she remembered because she was drawing pictures of sheep on the leaflet with the tiny pencils used…

She was just a college kid padding a resume, but in his memory, she was much more. There was a mixtape tattoo on her right forearm because she lived and breathed music. She loved the ways a mixtape was like a time capsule, carrying the past into the future. …

There are Christmas songs on the radio, but the snow lining the median is a sick grey color. We’re ghosts and we glide down the highway, lit only by the overhead streetlights and our nostalgia. It’s late and neither of us feel like sleeping. We drive instead.

“Midnight Mass was…

He tells me to smile, but I don’t. I’m too busy trying to figure out how to kill him.

“Tell me a story,” I say as I lean against the headboard and light a cigarette. He stands, buttoning his shirt. The sheets are still warm and we’re both breathing heavy.

…

Late at night, when all the lights were out, I would sit by my window, watching the world twenty-three stories below and waiting in nervous anticipation for the woman in the building across the alley to appear in the frame of her window. She was a complete stranger, a woman…

I have the strange urge for it to be summer. I’m beating myself with nostalgia. I’m rooting around in my past again, something I’ve sworn time and time again I would never do. But I find myself remembering. I find myself wanting to go back.

Back to the goodbyes. Back…

“I heard you were back in town,” she says as she closes the car door and steps into the light streaming from the overhead streetlamps. The tiny parking lot is empty apart from his car, parked several lanes away from hers. “What’re you doing here?”

He turns his head from…