Showing results by author "Bridget Clerkin" in All Categories

A man and woman play a strange game of Twenty Questions with a boy they've just met. McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco.

She will never forget that summer - when the bones began to surface. The decomposing skull of a dog, then that of a cat. Later, birds. Her parents even made a game of digging them up while the children played and kept the tiny trophies on display in their home. And then her cousin was implicated in a grisly murder. Did that strange find really mark the creation of a monster in their midst? From the acclaimed author of Monster comes this chilling story of a long-buried childhood memory and a family bent on denial.

A powerful story about a mother struggling to keep her family together amid unsettling events: the family dog goes missing, her teenage daughter has become increasingly rebellious, and a bloated, unidentifiable animal corpse washes up on the local beach. As her two younger children hang up missing dog posters around the neighborhood, she discovers that a class ring identical to one worn by her old flame was found in the mysterious creature, and now the local news and her children are beginning to ask questions.