At least, that’s what she tells Mom and me three weeks after Dad leaves on a shiny September Sunday, nicking the corner of our mailbox as he peels out of the drive, exhaust fumes roaring through the ancient muffler like rocket fuel in his wake. My sister tells us he’s gone back to his home…

When Jackie put the cigarette between her lips, a decade disappeared. “Been a while,” Tara said. Jackie pulled her knees to her chest and leaned into the give of her plastic chair. “Feels like we’re back in high school.” “If we were back in high school, we’d be smoking bots behind Gabe Beresford’s garage.” Jackie…

Lisa had been surprised at how hard fawns could suckle at a bottle. Their needy yanks moved their necks like swans. She loved watching the look on their faces as the glugs of warm formula went down their throats, stray drops beading on their muzzles. This first-thing-in-the-morning task at the wildlife rescue Lisa had been…

Carla, the waiting room pro, shuffled through the coffee table offerings and brought back three magazines. She offered me one. I couldn’t read a word, but flicked through the pictures of aspirational houses, aspirational bodies. “Remember those real-life tragedy movies we watched with Gran?” I said. “Mm?” Carla was trying to silently rip out a…

The twins, Dash and Promise, came of age in the long part of the war, when it was for them a train extending in both directions forever, no beginning or end in sight. It was a time they lived with their mother in a moss-stained, manufactured home hung off the western skirt of the Cascades,…

The gardens are overgrown. It’s the first thing I notice when we pull up the drive — ragwort choking lilies, roses climbing faded brick. It is late September, the year I turn twenty, and Dad has spent the entire ride from the Greyhound station talking business. He manages the regional branch of a freight company…

Father stood in the corner of the kitchen between the cupboard where Mum kept the pans and the sink where she spent her time washing those same pans and then filling them with water to boil the vegetables. Tasks the house robots could have easily performed had she wanted them to. Father didn’t actually stand,…

1. Wait until the frost on the grass melts to the tips of your fingers. This should be around mid-December when the branches on the apple trees frighten your mother. She’ll shake her head at them while she drinks her tea in the morning. 2. The spot between the garage and the fence in the…

My mom was the one who told me about the herd of elephants walking across the country. She just dropped it into the conversation, kind of a throwaway, a distraction from the other things she was saying (Has your ex gotten remarried? Are you still at that job? Haven’t you been promoted yet? And so…

There were fresh marks on my thighs. Thin crisscrossing lines of abraded red skin. In the six weeks since the itch had arrived, it had harassed every part of my body but its favorite place, by far, was my legs. I lifted a foot up onto the rim of the bathtub and examined the welts.…

It is quiet in Meagan’s room. She is kneeling on the floor, elbow-deep into a backpack. “Hurry!” Lucy yells from somewhere far away. “Uncle is waiting!” Meagan presses the clothes into the backpack, panting. Light jackets for the bus, and Lucy needs the pink blankie that she still takes to school with her, even though…

On a mild April morning, when I was five years old, I walked out our patio door that backed up to the mountain foothills and got lost in the desert for four days and three nights. I was found ten miles away in a sandy wash in between a couple of boulders, and for weeks…