There’s a hotel in outer space. Only the rich can afford to stay there. The satellite-hotel has a room where you can see through the glass floor and ceiling, submerge yourself in dust and planetoids like sprinkles suspended in jelly. We read about the room in an old, stolen issue of Discover Magazine. Viv doesn’t…

I met Verrant for a drink at Cy’s Roost, a small college dive bar on Welch Ave, a street known for the bars and tattoo parlors lining its sides which occasionally graced the airwaves featuring drunken student riots. The conflict in Iraq had been over for us for nearly two years, but the memories were…

The hour was three, the rest had gone to bed, a tennis match aired, and Nelle had something to say to her mother. Save the popping sound of the ball off the women’s racquets, the house was quiet. The sound, like an unplugged suction cup: puck, then puck, then puck. The rhythm calmed her. Tomorrow:…

I was going through a difficult time, so I bought a plant and named it after myself. I heard somewhere that every time you water the plant, you’re affirming good care for yourself. When I got home, I put the plant in my kitchen where there was plenty of sunlight. A friend came to visit…

Claire Larsen had spent the better part of ten years trying to leave the farm she’d grown up on. The first time, after her father died, she had simply walked toward the road. For two days. It never got any closer. When she’d given up, hungry, disoriented and still crying, the walk back to her…

Baby knows she’s beautiful. Why else would thousands gather to gawk at her through the glass, day after day after dome-shaped day? After all, nobody flocks to see ugly things. Baby’s the name they gave her, since she’s the youngest orca in the tank. Despite this distinction, she’s three times longer and ten times stronger…

We can see the Antarctic coast through the upper windows of Inverse Tower Six. Were the water remotely temperate, we could swim the distance to die comfortably of starvation in Marie Byrd Land. The name sounds deceptively joyful. Merry Bird Land. The woman who bore the name Marie Byrd was the wife of an explorer…

The stiff tube your father helped you make from yellow poster board doesn’t let you move normally. You have to take small steps down the sidewalk. The holes at the top cut into your armpits. Just as the sun is setting, you wait for your friends at the edge of the woods, where you’ve all…

When the couple learned that they would no longer be living in the same city, they began making arrangements. She was moving up north for graduate school. He would stay in their city — hereafter only his city — because he had just started at a new company. She began saving boxes to pack away…

The Misguided Merman lay on the quarried stone of the breakwater, orange hull tilted to the sky, rigging trailing into low tide mud. A halo of gulls orbited. The smell of a week’s old catch tainted the air. James recognized his uncle’s fishing boat from a distance as he jogged near the wharf on Commercial…

It’s only after the birth of her second daughter that Laura Winslow begins dreading the visits to her parents’ house. When her oldest was small, she loved bringing her home for long weekends in Chicago, watching the girl burrow into her old bed in the room Carl and Harriette never redecorated, the house a perfectly…

Dear Baby: As I was running down Queen Street today, past the building that used to say Taco Bell and KFC and Tuesday Special $3.49 but now just says HUNGRY, I thought — when you are born, none of the children’s books will make any sense to you. “But Mama, what’s a telephone?” you’ll say,…