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…

I laugh at your need to keep your knees covered, shorts too long, pants too short, colors muted and dark.…

When the birds go quiet, the girls stop walking. The air around them is glassy and pale, like a glass…

It was the night Johnny came back to town, one of those pent-up summer nights when the sky trembled heavy…