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,…

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…