Lena’s nephew has a meltdown just as they are sitting down for the Christmas meal. His screeches are a detonated bomb, obliterating all the rosiness and holiday cheer with the sonar equivalent of blinding white light.

On my fourteenth birthday, My Hunger stepped out of my body and sat beside me at my party. She looked me up and down before wrapping both hands around my slice of red velvet cake and whispered,  “Well, I heard they get the colour from dead beetles anyway.”  My mother denied this, looked right through…

Yep.  It’s not worth trying for. But if you don’t it just sits there.  Before we moved up to the foothills, I fished off trawlers in the San Francisco Bay. Slow months of rockfish and salmon. Then a week in early spring brought an apocalypse of herring. The low tide  white with sperm. Rocks and…

A novel in three paragraphs, Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins is no beach read. In an all but unbroken 276-page stream of prose, Lesser Ruins probes the deepest crevices of the brain of its narrator, a middling community college professor and self-described “Montaignian” whose lifelong, and frequently destructive, obsession with the philosopher lurches him to the…

Zachary was a latecomer to the cottage on Fishers Drift. By the time he arrived as a child the place had weathered ninety summers; the rumble of foghorns had settled the angles of its wood where spiders lazed. He’d explore its corners, assemble stories from the atmosphere: shells in green ashtrays, the odor of rendered…

I read on the internet that soon, maybe next year, there’ll be a heatwave somewhere that will kill thousands of people, because it will last long and it will be hotter than ever, and people won’t be able to cool down or leave, because of power outages and internal combustion engines failing. The rest of…

And just like that, there’s a new vibe in the room. Sharp. A kind of after-energy, a post-concussive silence, just a whiff of sulfur and dust to hint at what’s happened.  What’s happened is this: we’ve just finished a story in English. Something about stones and the violence of luck. Or the luck of violence.…

for Jack Sheedy “Never chase the dog when she jumps the fence,” Richard’s father always said. “Don’t get attached. They’re for work, not for friends.” Richard rarely listened. + When the dog escaped the enclosure that morning, Richard followed, trailing her through old growth pine, the forest growing thick farther from home. Richard loved the…

I. Into the well the three men fell. At the bottom of the well, they died.   Did they, or didn’t they? Was it, or wasn’t it? + Long ago, in a dry valley surrounded by green hills flanked by greener mountains, a spring bubbled up in the shade of a fig tree.  The spring gurgled…

The street was quiet. No tires screeching on the asphalt, no dogs barking in the distance. Not even a bird flew overhead. The only sounds Jade heard were her sneakered feet falling on the sidewalk.  She smiled down at Tristan, who was sucking on his pacifier. He looked so adorable laying in his stroller, so…

I rowed on to the miniscule rocky island which held the lighthouse at its peak. From shore, my rowboat could only make it there in too long a time, and often the waves of a windy day delayed my trip by hours. Several hours after dawn, I managed my way to the small dock which…

Once there was a girl who was about to be a mother. It was a miracle that she was pregnant, because, like their neighbors, she and her husband were hungry all the time. They had been hungry for months. For years. Sometimes they ate black and crumbled potatoes they found in the fields.  Sometimes they…