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…

My mom used to pinch me so hard that her fingers would snap. Pinch. Like twigs cracking under feet. Pinch. Fireflies of pain. + I sat next to her at the salon, her hair all wrapped up in tinfoil as she smoked. I’m getting old, she said, her glare on her reflection in the mirror.…

Rita Whitman had long ago reached the point of no return in her feelings about her younger siblings, resenting their noise and needs and clutter, unable to see them anymore as individual children. Despite this, her next-to-youngest brother Lenny began to seek out her attention. Lenny would come home from elementary school just before her…

Back when the White Terror was ripping through Taipei and Tainan and dozens of other rising cities and villages that I had never set foot in, all the kids were scared that they would come home one afternoon and throw down their bookbags and baseball bats, and their fathers and grandfathers and big brothers who…

The one thing marriage gives you is someone to blame. James was always late for work but, a week after his nuptials, he blamed his tardiness on his wife. The wife took extra long getting ready this morning. You know how that goes. Women, right? And I knew Des always wanted a way out of…

The day after the babysitter left was the same day Janie found the prosthetic leg. She was walking in a field where corn had once been planted but since, Father had come along and combined it down. As a result, there were little bits of stalk poking out and making the ground uneven. Some, stubbornly…

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Constantin Reliu learned in January that he was dead. After more than 20 years of working as a cook in Turkey, the 63-year-old returned home to Romania to discover that his wife had had him officially registered as dead. He has since been living a legalistic nightmare of trying to prove…