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.

Alone at home after school, David drops a treat the size and shape of a pencil eraser on the shaggy rug, then calls his best friend, Bear. A black nose sniffs circles around the bison pellet. Nostrils shiver like fish gills. David wiggles his toes and clutches the couch cushion. He holds himself back from…

As many of you must know by now, Antarctic poetry, wireless bras, the history of table tennis, online dating for older adults, bluegill fishing, and my collection of seventeenth century cookbooks are among my varied interests. Last weekend, while I sat in my Subaru gnawing Casey’s chips and waiting on my daughter to exit the…

The house wept like a Madonna statue whenever it rained, steady streams in the corners of the walls, the paint bubbling and blistering. The trees wept pears, when it rained and when it didn’t, grass-green fists with gnarled stems and woody warts, blossom-end rot and speckled spores. They gathered all the pears, the rotten ones…