We take the I-88 offramp after a charred billboard that reads BITO and follow what signs haven’t been faded by the years and the weather. Aude, my girlfriend, wants answers, definitive answers, and for those we will visit the Oracle. We’ve been fighting about this for days, and here we are. It’s not worth fighting…

The first to die was Mrs. Jane Hanscombe, a former teacher at Shaker Lane Elementary in Littleton (2nd grade) and the longtime widow of John “Jack” Hanscombe (rest his soul) … Mrs. Hanscombe, who had at the moment of death reached out for and grasped with her time-gnarled hand a box of noodle soup. And…

At three in the morning my ex-boyfriend started to beat on my front door. It had been three years since I’d seen him, and I had stopped sleeping with a baseball bat next to my bed. I lay listening to his fists slam into the door as he shouted, “I forgive you! Open the door!…

He wasn’t sure what caught his eye, but something made Ira look again at the label on his newest flannel pants. Technically they were pajamas — men’s sport sleep pants, according to the tag — but as he was never warm enough and as the pants were so comfortable, he’d returned to the department store…

The Fence Maker began to punch up the tall fences before 1980, we are plenty sure. The fences stood twelve feet tall. The height was as regular as a regulation. At the end of a sunlight day, the wood cast such long shadows that the roads turned dark long before dusk. The first house with…

Translated by Vuslat D. Katsanis She remembered nothing, no; not a single thing. I could see it when she spoke. Her eyes were not cloudy, her hands were not trembling. She could find the right words easily. She was wearing her long gown, and had drawn a knit sweater over her shoulders; the red of…

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,…