The Summer I Stayed

8-week series | Ten letters | $25

Izzie Mulberry is making a film about her family. Her family would like a say.

Sixteen-year-old Izzie has a camera, a shot list, and eight minutes to fill for the library showcase. Her opening follows a letter through the house and out to the shed where she and her sister once ran a post office. Jacob retrieves it with a barbecue fork. Penelope would rather photograph the washing line than take another direction.

Then the swing breaks.

A spinal injury brings Izzie home to a bed in the dining room, a ramp that smells different in the rain, and a bathroom door she needs her dad to wait behind. The neighbors call her a fighter. People post updates and plan a fundraiser. Everyone seems to know what her story means before she has worked out how to get a cup down from the cupboard.

But Izzie has been telling other people's stories, too. Lane, her best friend, wants answers about a private audition recording she played for laughs. Penelope is making photographs of her own, and four seconds of permission turns into a caption she never agreed to.

Izzie still wants to make the film. She is less sure which parts of their lives she is allowed to keep.

Told in ten letters over one summer, The Summer I Stayed follows two sisters making art under the same roof, with very different ideas about what belongs in the picture.

Katie Tresko-Prout is the creator of Stories, Delivered, fiction by mail. The Summer I Stayed is her contemporary reimagining of Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did.

Letter 1 arrives at paid purchase. Then eight weekly deliveries over eight weeks. Letters 5 and 6 arrive together. Ten letters in all.

Begin Izzie’s letters · $25Give as a gift →

One-time purchase. Email delivery. For delivery help: info@storiesdelivered.com.