The Light I Turned On
I had spent six months being told I was imagining things.
On that screen I put the one thing no one could tell me I’d imagined, and I let it do the work while I stood perfectly still.
At the head of the table Adelina’s arm was frozen mid-air.
The smile curdled and died on Dinah’s face.
Aunt Gail’s fork slipped from her fingers and rang against her plate like a struck bell.
Every relative sat rigid, their eyes reflecting the pale blue light of the screen, reading — and rereading — the evidence that the man they had spent the last hour canonizing had been running another life for half a year.