Come Closer

He had imagined a person was as sleek and neat on the inside as outside. He couldn’t stand the mess, the chaos, the blood.

I tried to catch her off guard, to scream out the truth at an unexpected moment. But you can’t surprise a thing that lives inside you

Everyone has thoughts like this from time to time: What if I burned my husband? What if I pushed him off this cliff? What if I jumped off this roof? The thought came into my head and then disappeared just as quickly.

WE COULD devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental. But most of us don’t, and I didn’t either

“You number is seven,” she said. She took the deck of tarot cards and laid seven of them out on the table. Death, The Tower, Queen of Pentacles, The Moon, Five of Swords, Eight of Swords, The Lovers. I had no idea what any of them meant. Maria looked at the cards for a few minutes, then back up to me with her eyebrows pushed together, then down at the cards again.