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…

Five years on, Will has almost forgotten about the incident with Professor Evans. It’s clear from the moment that Alekhine arrives that he has not. It’s all he talks about. Will has been living alone since Chloe moved out six months ago, so there’s room for a permanent houseguest. In a lot of ways it’s…

It seemed so clear to me now, as I sat on the balcony with a glass of wine, my second and his fourth, that we are only what we are told we are as children. He recounted a moment from his childhood that he wanted to recreate for his own children, how each night his…

A woman down the shop knew about the hole in our fence before I did. From the storm, she said. The storm? And she told me a woman’s name. Our neighbor was sunbathing. When she saw me — through the hole — she tutted and dragged a blanket over herself. From the storm! I said.…

Dad was in California for work. He was there to save four hostages being held somewhere in Los Angeles. During the day, he would visit banks and grocery stores and ask the employees about who they missed the most in their lives. He would draw the people they described on notecards, then at night over…

She’s tubby, he says. I’m thinking haunch, two sweaters, sweatpants (why is sweat such a selling point?). It’s the end of a demonstration against violence to women and my mind is quite ready to veer from justice and truth to personal judgment, though the speeches have been good, including his girlfriend’s. He turns out to…

Six weeks before they separate and a year before they divorce, my parents sit inside a pickup truck they borrowed from my uncle, waiting to help me move on, away from the academy. Yesterday, they sat in the football stadium and watched me throw my cap into the air as two F-14’s flew straight at…

After he died I went through his toolbox where I found a Budweiser bottle cap onto which he’d carved the words “no more” with a pocket knife. I have no idea if this was from the last beer he had or if it was an artifact of some wishful moment. I used to carry that…

What will we do about all these rats? we say, because everyone is saying it and there are t-shirts: “What will we do about all these rats?” printed in glow-in-the-dark ink across the breast. There are t-shirts but no answers. Then Romeo visits our village dragging one thousand hissing burlap sacks. Romeo instructs us to…

The Gill-man receives a letter from a retired ichthyologist. Only recently did she learn of what happened so many years ago on her colleagues’ expedition to the black lagoon at the upper reaches of the Amazon: the misunderstandings, the maulings, the gunfire. She is so sorry. She would like to apologize on behalf of her…