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…

On a hot afternoon in late July, Daphne’s folks invite her to the kitchen. She hops onto her favorite, high-backed chair, folds her sticky hands in front of her, and waits. Her mother glances at her father. He nods. Her mother tucks her yellow hair back, takes a big breath through her nose, and starts.…

Because his father and his father’s father were both veterinarians, and because he could often be found carrying crickets and cockroaches to the outdoors in the cradle of his palms, all of us, including Mr. Cooper, assumed little Tim was destined to become a veterinarian, and that the state of Kansas’s career aptitude test, if…

And you decide to leave the brewery and go to dinner in separate cars, because even though it is your fifth date, he has still not made room for you in the cab of his truck, still has not moved the cherry-red, sixty-pound toolbox that squats in the passenger seat. And even though your car…

A woman screams in the middle of Dulles: it strikes you as odd, out of place this far through security. She is young, early thirties, and the sound she makes is plaintive and desperate and raw, animalistic. A man has stolen her backpack. He’s tall — perhaps six-five — and has short-cropped brown hair and…

The cardinal landed in the crabapple that was still draped in wet, spring snow, and it was something about the weight of the bird, the way the branch bent under it, that made Brea stand up and go for the shotgun. A few weeks ago, it had been a butterfly, which had followed her inside…

I. Allergies Maartje Dijkstra lives in a squeaky-clean apartment whose surfaces are scrubbed daily by the hands of others. Her legitimate excuse: she’s allergic to dust, pollen, mold, hairs, and latex. At the high-rise office near the Rotterdam port, she works in a private cubicle with squeaky-clean linoleum floors and glass partitions. The rest of…