I don't remember exactly when I started "spying" on my daughter, as she put it, but I think it was about the time of her first period. The old closeness between us was gone, and I knew she wasn't telling me everything. I was desperate. I had never wanted to be a...
I didn't really know why I was waiting up for Raf. She was only a friend of a friend, and I was letting her stay with me until she could find her own apartment. Raf's fit, muscular body, her glowing, sand-colored skin, her dark eyes and her smoky voice had nothing to...
"Whutcha drawin'?" asked Vic, resting her chin on my shoulder. I hadn't even heard her enter the room. "Pictures," I mumbled. I thought of drawing as a secret pleasure, like masturbation with pencils. Vic's eyes on my artwork made me very self-conscious. She seemed...
My eyeballs were so hot with rage that I saw the two women through a red blur. "I need my fucking money today, Tara!" I yelled. "You said you'd have it." I was angrier at myself than at her. My own gullibility felt as unbearable as scratchy woollen underwear. "Chill...
"We have a prop for you today, Johnny," purred the avant-garde lesbian-feminist art instructor I thought of as Ms. Muff. I hated the way she used the royal "we," and I hated her version of my French-Canadian name, Jean. There's something about being naked in a roomful...
This story appeared in The Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly (Haworth Press), edited by Judith P. Stelboum, in 2004 The eclipse of the sun didn't seem important to me at the time. I had never been especially interested in the movements of stars, planets, or other...
"Mistress Jenkins, is this where you feed your imp?" I don't dare express my confusion. "Your pet demon," the voice explains. I am naked and shivering in a room that is really too large to be heated only by the fire in the stone fireplace. My long brown hair, flowing...
"To market, to market To buy a fine pig. Home again, home again, Jiggedy jig." Carolyn bounced her squealing two-year-old niece on her lap as she sang to her. Little Carrie, child of Carolyn's married sister Amanda, loved the rhythm and attention as shamelessly as her...