The family’s stomachs have been rumbling for hours. They stop at one elaborate, well-preserved, ivy-festooned Victorian house after another requesting to be let in, but the chefs only shake their heads as they fasten the place down, muttering about the storm. Outside the locked French doors, with their hands and faces spread and smeared over…

The robots stood apart from us, some meters away, blandly surveying the unfolding scene with dull-glowing eyes. “Now comes time for the question of what do we do in the aftermath? I, for one, am willing to bravely follow the robots toward an uncertain future,” the mayor said. “Have we really lost entirely?” a woman,…

She wanted to ball up her fist and punch it through the glass, so she did. Why not? Who was there to stop her from throwing herself into something terrible? The glass broke into big chunks that fell into the sink. No stardust, no glitter, just slabs of silver with gray backs shattering in the…

You wake to the whinny of a chainsaw and right away you know Dad is cutting down another tree in the front yard. Instead of getting ready for school, you head out into the cool spring morning and wait for him to notice you. Until recently Dad was an arborist, working out east. He knew…

The audience leaned forward in the dark. The only light shone down like a heavenly blessing on the magician in his black silk cape as he caressed the box in front of him, murmuring to it as he might to a lover. His every gesture — the sensual tenderness with which he touched the box,…

Since she’d been in recovery Abby had granted herself the serenity to accept the things she could not change. So she tried not to watch the conveyer belt too closely should a recyclable slip past the sorters and into the trash chute. Because it wasn’t about the recyclables that slipped past; rather, any glass, aluminum,…

He says she destroys everything. He doesn’t mean this as mordantly as she takes it, but that doesn’t matter, his words sink to her marrow. What he means is that she is not careful with the charging cords of electronics, nor the book that he lent her that she took everywhere for six months, nor…

She picked up her first stone when she was seven years old. As she leaped to avoid cracks in the sidewalk, she noticed the speckled, pinkish rock in the center of a concrete square, as though an unseen hand had tossed it into her strange, solitary hopscotch game. Orb-like, vitreous, perfectly smooth, the rock reminded…

Madam was outside in her air-conditioned hall, holding court again with her new best friends. Sir, her husband was out for work, as always, and her two sons were away at boarding school in Shimla. But that wouldn’t stop her from spoiling rotten her niece, Sweetie Di, and her fiancé, Amrikan Sir. They lived in…

Translated by Amalia Gladhart Things happened more or less like this: the guy came walking down the neighborhood sidewalk. It was early Saturday afternoon and the sun was at his back. He stopped in front of a railing painted green. Oh no, he thought, oh no, please, not again, how old could she be? Seven,…

An enormous cactus grew in Sra. Rosales’ front yard, and it looked exactly like her late husband. She encountered the cactus as she went to throw her husband’s chair to the curb. The bristles formed a little mustache, and under that, a frown. “Oh come on,” Sra. Rosales explained, “I don’t need it, and nobody…

The boss came in Monday morning wearing an eyepatch, but none of us asked him about it. He never liked discussing personal matters, and we were afraid of him anyway. Herb wondered if it was rude to avoid asking about an eyepatch, and Mary said, “It’s a personal matter. How much more personal can you…