I ran over a nightjar with my car. It wasn’t my fault—it sat there roosting in the right lane of the road. I was on the phone with my brother when it happened; he’s apprenticing in ear-nose-throat. He’d changed rotations, went straight there from gyno. They’re all...
For two years now, Leonard’s wife hasn’t wanted to have sex with him. He figures it might have to do with her mother passing, or maybe it’s because both their kids are in college and the house is empty. Maybe it’s biological. He has no idea. Hell, for all he knows, it...
The third store we visit has been raided. The shelves are like rows of gapped teeth—missing flashlights, missing batteries, missing fans, missing gallon jugs of water. Our list is a prayer in your clasped hands. “What about candles?” you ask, and the nervous girl...
Here is what you’ll bring to grandmother’s house: two eggs flour cocoa powder a baggie of your mother’s herbs from her grow closet (for her glaucoma, your mother claims, and don’t even think of sneaking any) the bill from QVC with STOP GIVING THEM MY ADDRESS in your...
I know something is wrong when the spot in the corner of my right eye won’t go away. I was hit until I saw stars, years ago and not by you, but this is different: this isn’t a star but a fuzzy gray cloud. Whenever I read, it floats along with me on each line, blotting...
“Sit sideways,” the photographer says, “or you won’t fit.” Obediently, they turn, bare flesh sliding smoothly against the porcelain, and dangle foolish coltish legs over the side of the bath. “Look at me, not each other. Hats off your faces. Scoot closer. That’s right...
Last stop on the LL line. Subway platform outdoors, a track on each side. A green-lit bulb above each track. The bulb goes green on one track, then on the other, and the people race back and forth from one train to the other, spitting out curses. Up in the control...
Every thought and prayer was answered. Everything reversed. The news crews packed their vans with cameras and microphones, and the people they were interviewing, some of them covered in blood, most of them elderly, floated back into the grocery store. The produce...
As she kills the flies, Gloria asks for mercy, then sprays an insecticide that sticks to the walls for weeks. Since her roommate is gone, her apartment is filthy, and the flies seem to regenerate in every corner of the ceiling and fly out of every pipe. Sometimes,...
That story you’ll never tell is the house on the street in every Seventies horror movie you devoured in the blue fug of your best friend’s mother’s cigarette smoke. The story you cannot tell has shutters and a deck and a swinging For Sale sign. Do you carry a lot of...
The summer I babysat the Brady twins, their parents were on the brink of divorce. My parents were on the brink of divorce too, but at least I knew about it. Nobody had told the Brady twins that their world was about to splinter into a before and an after, but they...
Sundance Lee draped his old snagging blanket around his shoulders. It hadn’t snagged anyone for many years. His legs were too skinny, and there was too much silver in his thin braids. Still, it was powwow season. He had plenty of opportunities. During the Grand Entry...