“How Kind of You to Come”

In what may be the first and last sort-of ghost story of my career, I present “How Kind of You to Come,” a short story I wrote for Neil Fein’s Magnificent Nose, a tale of Halloween, art, grief, obsessive love, and selfies. Here are the first two paragraphs:

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve forgotten her face. It’s become a disordered collage: the slope of a nose, the curve of a lip, a glow of brown eyes. Memory no longer assembles them into a face.

So I paint everything else. Her front door. The in-between coat she wore in autumn. Her beagle. The mums that grew in her yard. The grackles that flocked around her at the bus stop. Her clarinet case. Her long, sequined prom gown. Her boyfriend’s motorcycle. The instruments of her destruction.

Read the rest here.

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