1. “My BGF teaches English literature at an average, unknown state university, where other than the chili pepper on his Rate My Professor, from which he derives an intense and somewhat perverse personal pleasure, he has not won an award since the fourth grade.” 2. “My BGF has worked at Sports Authority and The Old…

We heard a story at the start of seventh grade, one we’d heard a hundred times before, that took place in the early 1980s, the year Krull came out, a movie we’d only seen on basic cable, the good parts spliced out. Telling the story was a rite of passage meant to scare us into…

What was the name of your first pet? Grover What was the breed of your first pet? Cocker Spaniel Where was your first pet purchased? At a going out of business sale. Every pet came with a collar and an Iams bag. Grover was the last dog in the pen on account of his cherry…

The therapist carries her heart in a small paper sack. Like a lunch sack, crumpled and brown. Her heart is pulsing inside it. Her heart leaves a red splotch on one corner, like a strawberry stain. She thinks of it like an emotional transplant. With her heart in her body, the therapist can’t stop crying.…

Being a nanny was not going to be Manju Gupta’s full-time job forever. Her husband, Krishna, had only just graduated from law school and taken the bar exam. They were waiting for his new job as tax attorney at the firm of Bundy, Willis, and Brown to begin in the fall. She had not so…

I want to ask her if she remembers that afternoon like I do. If it’s sharp like it is in the creases of my mind, tucked into my brain like the way she taught me to fold a sheet, the point so precise that it doesn’t admit anything else. I can say the words in…

I enjoyed most pulling my teeth out during school. I was never pretty anyway, Fit for candlelight, my parents would say, so I felt no aesthetic affliction with these small forfeitures. In fact, I encouraged them because I felt they lent me character, which I was told I also lacked. I spent evenings testing each…

When Ron saw the headline from his daughter, “Last Great White Dies,” he almost picked up the phone. His daughter made a lot of noise for extinctions. Her posts had videos like those at the Oscars where they showed the dead. The animal as a kid; the animal surviving; the animal mating; the alpha; the…

There are no streets named after presidents in Port Storm. There are only seven streets anyway, and one of them is gravel. I wish I were a boy. It’s not that I mind being a girl, but there’s nothing for a girl to do in Port Storm. If you don’t work on a fishing boat,…

She was always hungry, so when Adeline ate her beautiful baby boy, no one was surprised. Not her husband or the friends who commented relentlessly on her appetite. “Look how she eats!” “Where does it go?” They exclaimed with delight and horror. “Her legs, they must be hollow!” “You’re insatiable!” Her husband often claimed, sprawled…

“Before he became a clown, he was a bit light-footed,” Mom said. “Your father could slip away in the middle of a funeral and nobody would notice.” These were stories I collected about Dad, who I barely remembered from childhood. My father, Mom said, was always doing handstands and forward flips for anybody who had…

Marina had always known she would be a Mother. She had no discernible talent, wasn’t particularly pretty or intelligent. But she had a womb, and the moon needed those. She signed up the day she became legal, scrawling her name across a thick black line in her still childish-looking cursive. Marina didn’t tell her parents.…