Ginny stood on the counter of the diner decorated in tinfoil. She’s my wife, if you want to call her that, which I do. She’d made bracelets and earrings and a fake-fancy necklace by folding and...
The day after his wife left him, taking their three-year-old son with her, Larry Watkins took out his circular saw, attached the metal-cutting blade, and carefully sawed his 1974 Cadillac Fleetwood in half. It was not...
It is past midnight and Janet is up in the oak tree. She is the bird with black feathers. When she twitches her head the tips of her black feathered braids just brush the tips of...
When she was seventeen, Loretta discovered that she was pregnant with Blue Simpson’s child, a shame really. Not because Tildon turned out to be a bad son. (In fact, he would do quite well, thirty-two years...
I can’t recall when I first started scribbling those little notes I later stashed in various hiding places around the apartment. It sure as hell could not have been a lot earlier, because at the time...
Most of all I hate the sun, loud human voices, and pounding. Rapid, rapid pounding. I am so afraid of people that if I hear someone else’s footsteps and the sound of voices in the corridor...
The alien wasn’t green and had no antennas on his head. He looked ordinary except that he was about a quarter size. In fact, with his gray clipped mustache and his gloomy countenance he reminded me...
In the still of the night, you are surrounded by darkness in the room of your childhood. Sticky and smelling of semen, you hear the familiar footfalls that you recognize as your mother’s. Next to your...
l had planned on spending the holidays with a bottle of Chablis until my sister Mag showed up, itching for a fight. At the restaurant, she switched tables three times. The first table had no view,...
She wriggled, squirmed, just a little, but a little was too much. It started as a shimmy at her hips and twisted up through her shoulders, reminding her of the rippling way a wet dog shakes...
My wife is one of these people who drives on the freeway with a mattress on top of her car, held there by a single string. I first found her in a duplex made over into...
His heart suddenly flipped over in his chest. “Just like a carp in the kitchen sink,” Grigory Katz thought. To calm himself down, he stuck his nose into his scarf and breathed in his own warm...
A cat was lying in the ditch by the exit road to Skogså, one of those long, strange autumn days when I’d just entered seventh grade but mostly tried to learn about magic, if any occult...
When my husband first announced that he was leaving me, there were no packed bags. No studio apartment had already been leased on the other, seedier side of town. There were no missing photo albums or...
Now that Caroline lived alone for the first time in her life, she began to be irritated by the cleanliness of her house. When she left something somewhere, it stayed there. If she didn’t enter a...
The car that ran over Heidi didn’t even put on its brakes, let alone pull to the curb. Instead it signaled right onto Lexington Street. Heidi was a puppy, and a worried bloody smear on the...
Hugh Furlong tells people that the single, snapshot moment that’s been burned into his brain to mark the end of his childhood was the moment he saw his brother Peter’s fist make contact with Albert Frank’s...
My parents always had visitors. They would come in the evening and sit in folding chairs on the back porch of our small house in New Brunswick. They greeted me—an only child —with the warmth of...
His father was now his mother but he was still an epic asshole. “He won’t even let me get a tattoo,” Josh said. “He gets his whole dick cut off and he won’t even let me...
Yuda is banging the wall with his pillow; Moishe is switching the lights off and on again. I lay silent, not involved in the nightly disturbance. “He’s coming!” calls Zvika, the sun-shield watcher. We get under...
On the third day after they moved to the country he came walking back from the village carrying a basket of groceries and a twenty-four-yard coil of rope. She came out to meet him, wiping her...
That night we were having guests for dinner, and Ines had been in a frenzy all week. She hunted down innovative recipes on the internet and buried my desk in sheets of paper as she printed...
And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled...
My mother said to me: ‘You must go to school, or they will lock up your father.’ There were five of us children at home, four girls and one boy. The eldest was my sister, then...
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