Skimming Jason called me last June. I owed him two thousand bucks — party favors for graduation bashes. I had too many friends when I was in school. Jason wasn’t calling to party. I could’ve kept avoiding him. But he called instead of showing up, so I figured I’d try reason. Jason’s big, but he…

Someone suggested swimming and someone else said that in this weather all we need is another incident. Someone recalled that there was an expression that perfectly explained this very moment. Someone said that yes they remembered it, lightning doesn’t strike twice, and someone else said that as a matter of fact that’s happened to a…

Adie usually finds them in the odd places. We had our wedding outside by a river. She found a dead bird, probably taken down by a stray cat, under one of the folding chairs that we used, and then she brought the thing home. When it comes time for presents, our friends know Adie and…

Cindy and Leah were nearly identical twins—both had almost-white skin and almost-black hair, but Leah’s eyes were a strange pale green and Cindy’s were a strange pale brown, more like a shade of orange. Also, Leah could make things appear, and Cindy could only make things disappear. When we were in elementary school, both seemed…

A guy with breasts sings down at the bar, Rick becoming Richelle. She’s raising money for estrogen and to turn her “rocket into a pocket.” In Seoul, she says, they do the operation for a steal. She tells bad Bush jokes, and shares her getting-to-be-Richelle travails. Toward the end of her act, she croons her…

Elizabeth Baum, Joseph Baum, and Samuel Baum were buried in a cemetery south of Caffey’s Inlet near Duck. A migrating dune was threatening to bury the cemetery. In June 1909 Josephus exhumed his brother, Samuel, and his parents, with plans to reinter the coffins in the Baum Family Cemetery on the Whitehall farm near Grandy.…

The rehab program was court ordered, so when they kicked me out, the police brought me to my father’s. Having been a prosecutor, he pulled strings — told them he was giving me one more chance. I hadn’t spoken to him since my mother’s funeral two years before. Better than jail, I thought. Receiving me…

Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast. Asseem, thought Helen. She let the word roll around on her tongue, unpronounced, savoring the decision to speak it aloud. But she didn’t. Not yet, she told herself, and concentrated on her…

From the bus stop I walk up the gravel service road. All of the puddles are frozen over with thin windowpane ice and I amuse myself by stomping through the sheets of crystal. They break with a sharp crunch and a whoosh as the air escapes around my boot. No puddles in the potholes beneath…

January 19, 1996 The day was cold, but the starter had not frozen over. Not entirely. A thin skin of ice veiled the ignition, but not so deeply that they couldn’t smash through with a key. It happened like this: Abby swiped the key from her father’s den and took Charlie by the hand. “Be…

He started with the lowest branches. You can see them piled in the mud by the crabapple. He cuts them with a plain handsaw, working with a carpenter’s skill, though we’re guessing from the half-built racing engine in his garage and the tools hanging on the wall that he’s a mechanic, or was. He hasn’t…

The sun bent a-blurry on the Pacific Coast Highway. Charlie and Jim looked into the closest star and tried to blind themselves, but they hadn’t the guts. Charlie pulled to the side of the road. “There goes that idea,” Charlie said. “I see blobs of paint,” Jim said. “We’ll get going in minute. Try to…