And the day came when Jose told his wife that climate change was a fact and love was no longer a reliable basis for marriage. At first, she assumed he was reading headlines aloud, but then she understood. It had been wrong for her to get a tattoo without including him. The things they’d shared…

For many years I lived alone with my cat. I worked at a job like everyone else, but I only shared my life with my cat. He’d been my mother’s cat before she died and, at the moment she died I’d seen his shadow in the window. He was a marmalade cat, an unneutered tom…

It’s an honor for me to even have been invited to this seaside post mortem exam. I’m only a second-year grad student, and the next lowest ranking academic to attend the cetacean necropsy is a post-doc from my department named Ismael. He’s the one who invited me, and I am grateful for the opportunity —…

You do this work long enough, you find one. Lupe opened the door on a couple who had OD’d in their underwear, a needle hanging from the woman’s arm. Marcia found a rich man sprawled on his back beside a bottle of Cialis, his dick still hard when the EMTs rushed in. Most of them…

This is a kind of love story. The kind of love when the world is war. + Nineteen and restless, she waited for news. Her sweetheart, Albert, fighting over there. Somewhere outside France. The flowers bloomed anyway. + Before the day withered, she gathered eggs. Pale and brown. As varied as skin. She cradled them…

They emerge naked from the sea. They are blue-faced after swallowing lungfuls of air, their long, fat legs wobbling to hold their bodies upright. They speak in a language consisting only of mimicking fishes’ soft-spoken blub-blub-blub. Their straggly hair is tangled with seaweed and dead fish. They do not know how to close their eyes…

I knock on my sister’s door to make sure she is still alive. When she opens it, she is not dead, but she does have a swollen finger. It looks as if she has an eggplant prosthetic attached to her palm where her ring finger should be. I take her hand in mine and the…

Austin scratched at his sunburned ankles and flicked sand fleas into the Gulf as the surf licked at his toes like a dog trying to get a bad taste out of its mouth. The sun pressed close against his skin, sponging the sweat from his face and arms and leaving behind a dry film of…

You are not like other children. You prefer to wear suits, no sweat pants, baggy shorts, shirts with team logos. You are not a slovenly child, she tells the reporter. Your model mother lifts her chin, smiles. You are the shrunken image of him, a father who is too old to be your father, a…

Tom didn’t understand why, when given the opportunity for a free car in the afterlife, Stacy would choose a piece-of-shit Camry. He stepped from his truck, leaving behind the climate-controlled seats, authentic leather, and expensive GPS that had guided him here. Fresh blood circulated through his legs and feet, and he stretched against his truck,…

I smell smoke. I’ve smelled it for three days now and I can’t smell anything else. Old smoke. I experimented with breathing through my mouth. It’s not there then. When I breathe through my nose, it smells like a smoking room in a motel—before they spray it with that stuff they spray it with. That’s…

I remove two matches from the sun-bleached cardboard box on my dash and hand one to John. He pauses, a slight display of resistance. But he takes it, just as he always takes what I have to give. “Shoplifting from Walmart,” I say. He stares at the match gripped between his fingers. “We should get…