Deep Blue
by Martha Anne Toll

1963. Katya detoured to St. Patrick’s Cathedral before ballet company class. Not to attend Mass—she didn’t need to mouth words and hymns that punctuated her childhood—but for sanctuary and anonymity.    

Genuflecting before she started down the great center aisle, Katya took a pew on the left toward the altar, where she could avoid Fifth Avenue’s street noise and bathe in the rainbow of colors refracted through rows of stained-glass windows. She felt alone in the cavernous space, less a child of her parents than an autonomous woman. St. Patrick’s bore no resemblance to the small parish church of her childhood. It wasn’t Mama that Katya recalled from church, it was Mama’s absence, her early death, as much a part Sundays as the colorless windows over the pews.

The House With the Plexiglas Frame
by Martha Anne Toll

Lynette awoke to find her husband Jack sitting in a Plexiglas house in her brain.  He was as clear to her as the blinking red 7:01 on the face of her digital clock.  Just in case, she rolled over and checked again.  He was not on his back, lips open, snoring. Gone.  As if she needed evidence! Her head was throbbing, punctuated like snare drums rat-a-tat-tatting.