“Fly, then,” she says. All quiet. Eyes are on me. The winter says I’ve got three seconds to learn how to float, or she will shrug my life out. At worst, she will go back to the party. The night will then follow her and we won’t know what to do with ourselves. What makes…

I read Lydia Davis on a train. An ex-lover gave me the book before we parted ways. There was a story, “The Dog Hair,” about a dead dog and his hair, and how no one could bring themselves to clean it. Several stories later I found a hair between the pages. I traced it with…

My mother bakes a lamb-shaped cake for Easter. She feels compelled to go all out because she’s worried my father’s lost soul might be wandering around the house. She’s convinced that Jesus will accept him if we all put on a good show. She’s sure they will spend eternity together despite what the church ladies…

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…