For only seventy-seven dollars, the TV preacher promises God will grant me a miracle. He clasps his hands in prayer,…

I bury my dead in this garden. Over there, under the cabbage roses. They haunt me through the day. At…

so I know you are eggs. Sunny side up, salmonella-scrambled, salsa-slathered, over-hard yellow-white discs fried in bacon grease until the…

I used to tell people that my first kiss was on a December night, under a pine tree, when a…

We’re not allowed to leave the yard, even when the other kids are playing in the wooded triangle everyone calls…

Colors baked into a layer cake of rock. A hot and dry May in Arizona. We cannot drink enough water.…

Four murderers, one of them with horn-rimmed glasses. A steady flow of pushchair mothers who divert to left or right…

The other girls laugh when she struggles to stand up in the ditch, her mouth edged with dirt. She braces…

The town scalper says he lost his eyes at the supermarket. Left them on a shelf in the toothpaste aisle,…

—finally, it is night and you wrench the bulb from the porch ceiling and all the moths plop to the…