At the hat store, the clerks knew her name and reputation. She was Selena, the girl who liked hats. But she was also the girl whose father had named her for a lunar eclipse. She’d been coming by for years. The shop was beneath the apartment where she had been born, but Selena never asked…

You want him to say all of the obvious things, how here among the stars, the Earth shrinking like a lost balloon beneath him, it’s hard to believe what we all take so seriously: Instagram and the NFL playoffs, the neighbor’s overgrown hornbeam, text messages in the dark. You want him to tell you the…

He wants his wife’s portrait painted. He knows nothing of art, doesn’t even have an interest, but a slew of recent police brutality lawsuits against the city, his firm’s biggest client, has accrued him the sort of money that’s got him thinking about lineage. He considers the foyer of the Garden District home he’s always…

For days I’ve been looking for the list. It’s somewhere in the house with the rocker, the lamp with the pink shade, the round mirror, the square mirror, the oval mirror, the postman’s desk, the photograph of doors — things I don’t remember acquiring. I look beneath pillows, scarves, woven baskets. I look in pockets…

At our weekly Wednesday dinner, Ruby and I burnt the fish and began her pursuit of moving on. I helped Ruby choose her best photos and rearrange the sentences of her biography into a more appealing order. Draw people in with the dancing, I said. Don’t mention the wax museum in your living room until…

I get home and check my answering machine. My daughter always says, Dad, why do you have that thing? You’re the last one in kingdom come. On it, there’s the sound of trumpets. It sounds like 10,000 of them, blaring away, and they play the sweetest melody. It might be one hundred horns or seven.…

Walt Whitman, Woodrow Wilson, Molly Pitcher, Vince Lombardi. These are the important people of New Jersey, she thinks, the people whose names adorn the service areas that dot the turnpike like prayer beads. They are not former presidents, she knows, because one of them is a woman, but they have done something great, something to…

I. Femke knows it’s not sex. They’re still enjoying each other’s bodies, and he never smells of anything but himself. She trusts her nose, her hunter’s sense. It’s not sex. “What’s wrong?” The question, posed in a casual tone, comes from her daughter, Luna, not from him. Eight years old and already observing her mother…

The thing is, and despite the story her dad still tells, Cathy and I saw it all. The way the buck stopped in the middle of the road as if for some reason it just couldn’t or wouldn’t go on. The way her dad’s pickup came hurtling around the bend, snow and mud and ice…

I. Eddie watched from his place in the shade, slumped against the mailbox, while his brother Luke twisted the rabbit’s foot with pliers. “Yank on it,” said one of the other boys crouched at the curb. Eddie pretended not to care, like he usually did when trailing Luke and his friends around the streets. But…

1. Thirteen, first time away from home, the 3×7 box of the lower bunk at Camp Piney Mount. My ribcage constricted with homesickness, breathing a conscious effort. A curtain of black hair fell over the side of my roof/your floor, followed by your all-seeing eyes. I crossed my arms against my sprouting breasts and pressed…

He says he wants to build a raccoon trebuchet, and I ask what exactly that would look like. I’m imagining bungee cords and repurposed bicycle wheels. A snapping sound. It’s the perfect solution to your problem, he says, and I bet they have plenty of tasty garbage. He traces an arc in the air with…