In the town of Grand Rapids much of the country’s glorious furniture was made. Chairs and tables, cabinets and desks, beds of metal, stools of wood, articles formed from materials that people from other towns didn’t know and couldn’t name. The furniture makers of the river city built with enchantments, with charms and what could…

House #1 has potential. Good bones, the producer tells you. Just needs a dash of paint, granite countertops in the kitchen, some stainless-steel appliances. Scrape off all the popcorn ceiling and tear up the carpet that smells like 1986. But first the crew takes shot after shot of a stain that’s spattered across the living…

I had to go out with him, no question—the same way I’d have gone out with an astronaut or a cowboy or a bank robber if their profiles had popped up on the dating app first. A real character. Next to the miniature briefcase symbol below his name: Official Mascot for the Night Creek Nocturnals.…

Bogdan slices diagonally across the patient’s eyelid, precisely following a marker-drawn line. Milo sits across the table, a mirror image of Bogdan in every way. Same green scrubs, same wide-set, black eyes, same assiduous expression directed to the patient’s face. “Who is this one?” asks Milo as he retracts the newly liberated flap of flesh.…

“Who left his hands like that?” my brother asks, pointing his chin toward the skeletal remains that protrude from our Father’s dark suit cuffs and lie neatly folded across his chest. “The funeral home,” I say. “He looks like a sea otter floating peacefully on his back,” sighs Alicia. My brother brought his new girlfriend…

Population 1303. Drive into town on a foggy night and the headlights dance like horses. The variety store cashier speaks only in lines from TV sitcoms. Last year’s drought left over a hundred dead locusts per crunchy square foot. Puritans have run the Optimists’ Club for five generations. Zeke’s Antiques sells mantelpiece knickknacks, but everybody…

In the world of tomorrow there was one rebel who maintained the roads connecting workers and hamburgers. See him now, in his raggedy white pick up chugging along the endless freeways with his toolbox, the engine powered by vegetable oil that leaked and stained the asphalt El Dorado gold. He flowed with the stream of…

Sugar work takes place in the basement kitchen, a long, dim room in the bowels of the old house. The others are apt to complain of the gloom, but I like the severe wooden paneling and wrought iron fittings. For it seems to me that any material as dour as walnut wainscoting must surely know…

Every fall, we carry the sled across the land. We follow the trees we have marked on other journeys. We travel from high up across snow to fields and highways through industry: railroads and mines, corn and wheat, shipping. At the ocean, we take our luggage out of the sled. The water carries it to…

The story of my life is a remake of an obscure Danish film whose title translates roughly to “The Cow Comes Home At Midnight.” The story of my life is the story of America writ large. It is meant as a cautionary tale about the perils of caution itself. No: it’s neither of those things,…

A man sits across from me, wrist wrapped in a bloodied rag. His knee bounces like it’s keeping time with a jackhammer. “Worried I hit the artery,” he says when he catches me staring. I tell him they would’ve rushed him in. “No one’s leaving you to bleed out,” I say. Seeming satisfied, he asks…

I’m gonna tell a lie, Lisa says. I saw your dad at Gino’s Pizza. On hump day. Wait, was he with Rachel? I ask.