Say there is a boy who wakes on a bus and does not know where he is. Let us say there is a woman beside him with a bruise on her arm. She presses it and he watches her toes curl and moments later the bruise turns green. Our boy asks what time it is…

Jonah learned to speak Dove from the Mourning Dove that nested below the gable outside his kitchen window. Every morning he would open the window and poke his head out into the dawn air. He would peek at the nest to see if the Dove was home (she always was) and he would say hello…

Miranda had almost missed the ragged dark-green windbreaker tied to the tree below her window. That Monday morning, when she’d awoken an hour before school started, she’d decided she would do her hair first, and as she finished brushing her hair against her shoulder, smoothing it together in her fist, wrapping it in a hair…

Gretchen stumbled into the ballroom and screamed. “OH MY GOD, IT HURTS, IT HURTS!” She gripped the knife at her stomach and plowed forward, weaving between the banquet tables. One foot kicked into the other. She jerked, her upper body pitching within grazing distance of Table Seven’s water glasses and gravy boat. “WILL ANYBODY HELP…

The place I am going — that place is called home. I have this fantasy where I get rid of it all, put a down payment on a little red car, quit my job, adopt a dog, and drive right out of the sunset. The dog’s name is Charlie, like the dog in All Dogs…

The Year of the Snake. The year good things will come to Ya Ya and her son. In the village, families decide which animals to slaughter. Soft clucking from farmers as they wrap hands around hens, the thud of the cleaver notching the tree stump. The stump ringed with blood for the dogs to lick.…

Even from one hundred feet up, the air smells of dust and dirt. The sky is bone-dry blue and relentlessly mocking, sheltering land as barren as burned flesh. In the orchards, the fruit trees are pale and skeletal. Industrious farmers scurry over the fields, hand watering their crops with the last of the reservoir water.…

I wasn’t offered the option of being given a car, as some girls were, instead of a big dance with all the works: a dance floor and a tent and an open bar, a band and flowers and catered hors d’oeuvres. A car back in those days cost, what? About $6,000, I guess, for compact,…

1. I am planning to remove the Moon from service. Do not consider this a temporary interruption. It will be permanent. 2. Statistics show that over 82% of violent crimes occur when the Moon is full. Isn’t it time we hold the Moon accountable? 3. Super moon, blue moon, harvest moon, blood moon a week…

Kept low, belly to the ground, the salamander of myth often found itself with serpents and other beings of the underworld. It was believed to live in fire. Historically, certain varying types of women have been called salamanders or salamandrine in their behavior. A salamandrine woman — a survivor, a whore, an outsider — may…

The boy at the Panamanian embassy in Paris was being replaced. Ambassador Tania Carrasco Gonzalez, who represented Panama in Morocco and Finland as well as France, didn’t care anymore whose son he was, whose grandson, or that his cousin was the Minister of Culture or that her granddaughter found him adorable. The boy simply couldn’t…

When Edie took the wash off the clothesline in the fall, she had to shake each garment in the wind, to be sure that no spiders remained in the folds. She shook each twice, three times, four. They were little, the shy white spiders with spectral faces; a soft flurry of tiny legs as they…