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.…

You’re a peach. That’s what she said to me. That’s what she always says. I hold a peach in my hand. The whole thing. Half. Skin. Guts. The wrinkled, rough pit. The parts people throw away. Then there’s the perfect peach. Not too fragile, or tough. The perfect peach is velvet against my lips. Three…

Mister Howards is a man who wants to be another man, and his life is not better off for it. He is a school teacher at Saint Howards where he teaches Social Projects to students whose parents could ruin his life for dramatic effect. Naturally, he is pessimistic about life, and life taught him this:…

“And so they’re up there, and you’re down here.” The girl reclines on a long rock, set in the mouth of the cave like a lolling tongue. Her words drift over the in-and-out breath of the waves and the rumbling roll of pebbles in the surf. They’ve been talking for hours now, ever since she…

1. Kelsey knew her Daddy wasn’t around, but she wasn’t old enough to comprehend specifics. Her Momma, Lynn, froze when Kelsey asked where he was. “Your Daddy’s… up in space.” It was more specific than “he’s gone,” but vague enough that she had time to let the idea ride before Kelsey smartened up. It was…

A few years ago, having arrived early for a flight that was then delayed, I found myself at a champagne bar in the Edinburgh airport, where I recognized the woman sitting to my right. It had been twenty years since we’d spoken, though of course from my seat in the balcony, I’d seen her at…

The woman was jogging through the park when she spotted the man, hunched at the base of an oak tree and caressing a ruffled, beach ball-sized mushroom. She stopped to catch her breath. “What on earth?” “Grifola fondosa,” he said. “Come look.” Together, the man and woman coaxed the mushroom out of the dirt. After…