I had a baby. “Why’d you have to have a baby?” Denny wanted to know. “There are so many babies on this block already. You know this neighborhood’s really changing. First the Starbucks and then we got a Gap.” + I had a baby. “I heard you had a baby,” Ellen said. “Mina Denelsky also…

We noticed it first — we, who I like to think of as the extremely sensitive people, the ones endowed with an unpleasant aptitude for sinking to the very floorboards of despair and feeling the pulses of ugly truth that surge underneath them. I carry splinters in both my palms, and I’ve sniffed the traces…

To Courtney, being even remotely cognizant of the possibility of one’s obsessive compulsive disorder seemed an indicator of obsessive compulsive disorder. She thinks she has obsessive compulsive disorder but doesn’t. Or at least she thinks she doesn’t. It was probably just loneliness, a way to count away the time. Matt has hair all over his…

Eddie and Kate climb over a guardrail. A narrow trail descends through huge dripping ferns. Strange smells – smoke, sewage, steak sauce – float between the trees. The trail opens onto a stony cove. Beyond it there’s a green glacial lake, then luminous blue slopes, distant, cut by trenches of snow. The far shoreline is…

I suffer a reversed vanity. Clinical tendency to tend to every detail of how I prefer to be seen, which is not at all. Even by myself. If forced to glimpse my own face? I do so eyes closed. I can’t bare anything more than faint outline of lips or arched brown stretched across the…

When the shells hit the zoo five hundred exotic species spurted like awkward pollen and scattered all across the tan streets and plumbing-covered roofs of Baghdad. The leopards ran for the Tigris. An elephant wandered into the middle of the intersection where I sat in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, praying to the…