December made her realize what she was doing. The slick, icy tongues of winter slapped against her bare legs as she waited outside Donovan’s apartment, though he only went by ‘D’ online. D, 45, three photos, one video, immediate match and message to follow. It was not like summer, when nothing could rupture the fantasy…

“It’s Heaven,” Kana’s uncle said, hands proudly on his hips while I watched the movement in the water, “for people who love sharks.”  Kana had insisted her uncle raised “sharks” in this pond tucked in the middle of a Japanese mountain range. But at only around thirty centimeters long in what had to be fresh…

One afternoon when my kid Sam was seven, he walked in from the front yard with another boy about his age, maybe a year or two older. This other kid was skinny, with dark hair and eyes, in a plain blue t-shirt, jeans and ratty sneakers. I said, Who’s this? I’m Nila, the boy said. …

Sulfuric acid. That’s what Mrs Thomasin was thinking about when the phone rang: sulfuric acid. She had heard somewhere, perhaps on the television, about a man—a killer—who had used the substance on his victims. The acid as she remembered it caused a sort of liquidity, dissolving the muscles in half a day. She didn’t want…

My wife’s family is now my family, too. We are four months out from the miscarriage.  After a long, ear-blaring flight, we land in the country of my wife’s origin. From the hotel, we take a bus two hours outside the city to a dusty town. To a wilted house, to my mother-in-law’s. For dinner.…

I only remember the log house as a cold place, a steady chill whistling through apertures in the chinking. My sister and I shared a room there—the north half hers, the south mine. Her window looked onto a fishpond and a split-rail fence, mine onto a modern scarecrow—an inflatable tube man dancing in the distant…

Dad came home towing a caravan. Couldn’t pass it up, he said. Any grumbles Mum kept to herself. At least it wasn’t half a butchered lamb and no freezer space. We watched her face soften as she reimagined the family future. A sunny one with road trips and spontaneous weekends away.  Thing was, Dad had…

I. Before. I can remember when I was a little kid, maybe six or seven, how all of Dad’s buddies used to make a fuss over Claire.  “Incredible.”  “Astonishing.”  “Absolutely miraculous.”  Their words.  I constantly reminded them that a Pteranodon wasn’t technically even a dinosaur, but they didn’t care. She was a giant prehistoric bird…

When her girl body hit the water deep in the gorge where the river sliced through rock as if through a vein, disappearing with a smack that echoed through the stillness only to surface silent, bob motionless on the water, we felt relief. We didn’t believe her when she threatened to jump because everyone knows…

Bodies pressed against yours as you plugged your carry-on luggage into the overhead carriage. An arm went up beside you. You neither ducked nor frowned at the frowsty mix of sweat and deodorant. The last six months had hit you with too many unpleasantries for some mild body odor on a plane to matter. You…

At the heart of Sarah Bower’s beguiling Lines and Shadows is the clever and self-deprecating Ginny Matlock, a talented mathematician recruited to work at a secretive nuclear testing facility off the coast of East Anglia in the 1960s. Her initiation into this outpost of the Ministry of Defence is anything but smooth. Self-conscious about her…

At least that’s what Cassie told me before the end, when neither of us could admit what we both knew to be true. We were eating at the table away from screens, a futile effort to reconnect. She told me about how herds in India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa have been observed staying with…