The dusty lampshade around the bulb cast more shadow than light, and her mother’s deathbed lay in semi-darkness. She glanced over at the neighbor. Old Mrs. Ryan nodded her agreement, so Joanne flung the curtains open. The pigeons that had congregated outside the window left in a flutter, and the pewter-grey light of the October…

Sun drenched skin, browned with age and looking like the old wrinkled leather that it was, stretched over hands that were more tendons and prideful obstinance than strength. Jasper turned the pan in a smooth, easy motion that he had taught himself over the last forty years panning for gold. He didn’t really care if…

Nen was resting in the living room, as ordered. Maybe resting more than recommended. It hadn’t been that long. The cast was still on her arm. She was reading a detective novel she had read and reread maybe every six months since she had been a freshman in high school. She had the mystery memorized…

First there is the paper folio of tickets, parents’ excitable talk. During long afternoons, your sister holds away the delicate, flimsy sheets, but she points out her printed name there, and yours. Then, the sudden bustle of departure: the four of you crammed into the backseat of your neighbors’ station wagon, the drive down to…

The old man sits at the kitchen table, though it is no longer much of a kitchen. The stove doesn’t work, but that is because he no longer bothers with it. The sink drips slowly into a basin, though only because he has let it. A mouse skitters across the counter, but it is no…

I had to agree not to get pregnant. I told Vick Clover, the recruiter, that I didn’t intend to have sex with anyone any time soon, but that didn’t matter. As “a woman of childbearing potential,” I had to produce a negative hGG serum test to participate in a Phase 1 drug trial. Then, I…

I remember when I first started wearing gloves. My mother gave me a “training” pair. I was hesitant, nervous, and shoving my knuckles into that small space felt so claustrophobic I began to cry. “You’ll get used to it soon enough,” she said, but as my fingers began to feel dewy with the constant shelter…

The soles of our sneakers pounded years of sodden leaves. The rubber of Reeboks skidded on dew the sun never burned up deep in the shady woods. We heard them behind us laughing. The redhead the loudest, screeching and puffing.  Margaret, Wendy, and I knew where to go. The woods were filled with abandoned tree…

He was four. His babysitter was fourteen. She glowed and lifted him into a glowing happiness where it was warm and safe. When he turned five, she turned fifteen, and the difference was negligible; he was still in love, she was still beautiful. The house glowed in the afternoons when they watched television together waiting…

The wisest man I ever met was called Higgs. He lived at the edge of the village and the village was at the edge of the world. When I was young, during the holidays or at weekends, I would often go to his place. We would play cards or do a jigsaw puzzle if the…

You know by now I left you a trail. See, I’m not entirely without sentiment, as you might have thought.  First: A pair of men’s black glasses near the rocky ledge of a waterfall. They were my father’s, and I miss them, but he did love waterfalls. Always made us pump our little legs as…

Siobhan was thinking about her breasts. This was no good.  In the books she edited, women thought about them all the time. Or if not all the time—these women were also much concerned with dimensional portals, untrustworthy cyborgs—far more often than Siobhan did. They compared these breasts (busts, bosoms, mammaries, and once, alarmingly, fronts; she’d…