Rationalizing didn’t help. No matter how much he told himself that this was a different woman, that it couldn’t be the same widow, he couldn’t escape the gut certainty that she was.

When I first saw the bright gold rip of gas flares against the Corpus night sky from the passenger seat of some guy’s green Datsun—all that oil just rushing incinerated into the air—I said, …

The color yellow and the red heart on the box remind me parts / of childhood are nice not / embarrassing. Does that include eating / cheerios with fingers?

Here it was laid out: we’d tricked with Clint a few times over the years. Sure, he was a geek, but he possessed this obscure magnetism. He was so indelibly himself, we allowed ourselves, when with …

The story the fiction writer reads is fiction. His wife has never cheated. He has never run over a dog.

I needed Alice to go with me to the Baha’i temple in Wilmette because she’d agreed to model in a photo series I was doing—white girls co-opting global cultures. I was calling it Multi-Culti, …

The position was meant to be temporary, covering for the receptionist at a dental clinic while she visited family for four weeks.

It did not yet boggle their minds that the insides of those things that fly also look like the insides of those that swim. They had yet to question why the bones of a fish could look like the bones …

Their forever never lasts that long. Gone by Christmas.

A cupboard is just asking to be opened. A cupboard doesn’t ask a question, but is, by its very nature, an entreaty. A cupboard says it did not ask to be a cupboard, did not ask to be an entreaty, …

The chicken crows at midnight. Crows at four o’clock in the morning. Crows when it rains. Crows when the sun sets. Crows when sirens blare down our street. Only stops crowing to eat.

The man was his father. How could he be so disgusted by him? His mother, long dead, always told him: your father will outlive us all, but not before he makes us suffer as much as he wants to, and …

Six hours into drilling, rescue crews heard one-year-old Jessica McClure singing “Winnie the Pooh” from the bottom of the abandoned well she had fallen down seven hours earlier.

But a job was a job, I reminded myself. Fulfill your duty. Prove your utility.

It was one of those thunderstorms came on sudden-like. Before a body could cover its head it had passed on someplace else. Here, in our holler, we were used to such storms.

And maybe if you had tried to find your kindest self—the one deep within you that all our friends told us probably wouldn’t reemerge until you were twenty-four—and said, yeah, you’re right, …

Years later, Toya would remember the boy’s birth among the coca plants, how he’d arrived in silence, like some sort of harbinger announcing the end of the world.

Perhaps we three shall only ever have in common the murder of Adler. And white garments, shoes, stockings, sleeves—even the body of the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse is shell-colored, if you ignore her …

According to a 2013 census, Japan has a population of 127.3 million people. Approximately 1.9 million of those residents are foreigners. I, a white American, have been inconsistently part of …

I throw the keys at the mirror and they crash, a pitcher of water shattering during a high note. Applause-worthy. Mickey says I fight ghetto and I always say that’s right like I’m proud of who I …