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,…

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…