Lived Stories

I work the front desk at the county clerk's office in Cedar Mill, Oregon, and in eleven years behind

The kennel in Fresno has this smell that gets into your clothes and stays there, like bleach over something older.

Water from the garden hose hit me in the face before I could open my mouth. It was freezing, smelling

The first time I held my son's baby, it should have been the happiest moment of my life — instead

I've run the night desk at St. Mary's ER in Billings for nine years. You see everything in that job.

The Woman Who Wasn't in the Grave Marta Havel was carrying a bundle of brushwood up the dirt shoulder

Dr. Marcus Whitfield walked into the operating room at St. Vincent Memorial in Charlotte, North Carolina

I ran my thumb along the edge of the manila folder and set it on the glass coffee table like it weighed

I’d known Eleanor Whitfield for nine years before I ever spoke more than five words to her.

I never planned on losing my breath at somebody else's wedding. That's what happened to me