“She didn’t want to commiserate. She wanted me not to have seen, not to know what it is like to move through the world embodying that particular target.”

“That’s how oracle cards work, she told me, they guide you where you need to go. I don’t believe in anything, but I’d like to.”

“Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon.”

While the story isn’t autobiographical, it is set in the landscape of my childhood. The summers were humid, gluey and close. Most everywhere was without central air conditioning.

Ilya Lyashevsky, whose short story At the Seaside is featured in Epiphany’s Fall/ Winter 2011-2012 issue, didn’t reach consciousness until he was twenty-five.

After reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History my last year of high school, I wanted to run off to Vermont to befriend a clique of elitist classics students and participate in modern-day Bacchic rites.