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,…

The first limb springs from the ground at the beach. It is a foot. One of the locals’ daughters pulls it from the sand as she collects mussels, which she drops into a bucket of seawater to watch their ghostly appendages wriggle out from their shells. She turns the limb over in her hands, thinking…

In sleep, Mary dreams of pinions and tailfeathers, of the empty hole between her beak and her throat, where her unspoken desire can escape. When she wakes Mary feels rustling deep inside. She hears it over the sound of the nurse brushing Mary’s long hair from its tangled nest, over her husband and the doctor…

I am already mosquito bitten and sunburned when I reach my brother’s cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere, though “cabin” is too generous, “dump” or “shithole” might be more accurate — roughly the size of the backyard shed where my parents still keep their rotting croquet set and patio chairs and the old push…

I At first Darcy thought it was a bird, its quiet, high keening seeping through her daughter’s bedroom door and pooling in the hall. True, something was a little off about the cry, something not quite birdlike, but with climate change driving so many creatures from their original habitats, it was about time for even…

“What’s the weirdest call you’ve ever been on?” The new kid actually showed up again, worked hard all day. What had it been now, two weeks? Kevin. Even his name was green. Kevin was someone’s buck-toothed little brother, the guy who never stopped dicking around in the back of remedial English. Paulie had to hand…

Stavros noticed me sleeping under my coat in the winter of my fourth year. I had taken to napping in the hallway of the Arts Building before the arduous bus ride back to the apartment I regrettably rented with two girls from my program. We’d moved in together amidst promises we’d be stemless wine glass-toting…

This oil painting is of a red castle towering over dark green foliage, set against a blue sky. Our perspective, as audience, places us on the ground, near the trees, looking up. The framing is such that we see more sky than trees; the ground is not in the frame. The picture is color balanced:…