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The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

Don’t send me home without a round of applause if not a title.

Lovers, a new set of six-word stories from Elizabeth Benedict.

Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

She was bad. A cool bad. All third-graders wanted bad like hers.

We drove, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

The everlasting shines through in the threshold between worlds.

I looked up how much everything would cost. Giving birth: $9,000.

You’re feminist? Neither one of you. You just like getting into fights.

Praise the ease of it: how simple it is to tell the dog he loves her.

Before April rings the chime, she forces her way up out of herself.

The blackness of her hair seemed to pull the color from her body.

The attendant instructs remember, immerse three times.

Fletcher was a squad leader. He ought to be able to get a girl.

If you tear down the web it will simply know this isn’t a place to call home.

Sundays, your wife at Mass, we locked ourselves in my room.

Third Place

Dad doesn’t believe I’m beauty queen material. I believe in myself.

He is not in the position to lose a friend. Not when one is all he has.

With your hands in the air you held an infant tightly, trying to save it.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

Late March 2002. “Mud time”—so called in Mad River Junction, Ohio.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.

These days I watch the world go by and do not breathe life into it.