In the front yard, we load our water guns, tell our children enough is enough, hold the barrel of the Super Soaker to their foreheads. “Any last words?” I ask but don’t wait for an answer. After weeks of being held captive, enduring daily tortures, we parents have developed a bloodlust that can be satiated…

The fox regarded the moon. You appear misshapen, she said. I am ever evolving and devolving, said the moon. But something’s off. Perhaps your eyesight. You’re not as young as you once were. Neither are you. The fox shook her head. Perhaps you’re crumbling. Oh please, the moon scoffed. Are you one of those cheese…

She doesn’t want painted urns, so when her class nears the Hall of Antiquities, she tells her friend she’s going to ditch, and then she does. A twelve-year-old frizzy brunette with some serious orthodontics work ahead, she ducks under a rope slung between the two wings of the museum, winds through a landscape exhibit and…

The Rulers of A Large, Rich Island Find what is better at being water than water, dig up what is better at being land than land. Pretend the ground is horizontal and build vertically to the sky. Assigning direction and parallel slopes to lines will prevent them from intersecting. Simulations approximate infinity. We are calling…

You’re almost grown when you realize it’s an odd hour for Dad to head back to the store. That it’s almost dinnertime. That what he says about being almost out of the twenty-four ounce Cherry Coke bottles and him needing to be there when the truck comes in to deliver them doesn’t add up. You…

Arise fever-sweated, epiphanic. I think of Harlow’s monkey. The delicate fingers clinging to the towel, believing in the impossibility that this piece of fabric is a mother. We study attachment theory. The secure attachment. The insecure attachment. The pushing away and the pulling together. The uncomfortable blending into one without accounting for error. With code,…

It’s a summer party, Fourth of July. Sweat rolls down your neck. You sip lemonade. Hot dogs char on a grill. Like much of the land-owning gentry, the host dug up the milkweed and aster and planted hydrangeas. This particular type is blue and sterile and useless to bees. “Nothing says Cape Cod like hydrangeas!”…

The girl sees it first, a smudge of fur along the gravel shoulder. She stops, and Small almost walks into her, then he sees it too. Yes, it’s real. Brindle-coated and square-headed. Probably wild born. Probably didn’t know what a truck was — those trucks that hurtle down this stretch with no lights on, that…

I talk to Haruki Murakami at the culvert by the bridge over Stickler’s Creek. Usually. It’s around the corner from where that 18-year-old got hit and killed, the one who dated her art teacher after graduation. I tell him how far I’ve run, and he says, Careful, always stop at the point where you think…

Father seldom came home for dinner. Now, he never comes home, and Mother gets a phone call every evening during dinner. She drops her fork, tosses back her waxy bouffant, and cradles the handset to her ear. “Uh hunh, uh hunh…Garlic and butter over spinach…It won’t stop us from loving you and you, us.” She…

Something pulls seagulls beneath the surface of the pond. I watch through my bedroom window. The birds use the body of water as a stop over between bay and ocean. One minute they’re bobbing with the waves. The next they’re a clot of white-grey feathers, a ripple, then stillness. The rest of the flock takes…

That kid Amaan stood on the playground, pushing kids over as they ran past. Children fell like daisies under the scythe. Producing a basket of strawberries, I said, “I have enough for everybody if each child takes one.” Amaan grabbed two handfuls and ran. Can you believe it? Kid is three and a half, four…