We are squatting on the outskirts in a house with black walls and a black hearth, where we eat and drink whatever we can get for free. For the real stuff Lover goes back into the city. He never comes home empty handed. Other people drift in and out, carried by waves of desperation and…

I’m at a cafe with my friend Lara, having a biscuit and coffee, and I’m telling her about it. “So here’s what happened. I rescue a little blue parakeet near the park coming home from work. I can tell it’s tame, the way it’s just looking around. And it’s too easy to touch. It lets…

An aquarium is just a container of containers. When we arrive at the Great Kelp Forest, I realize how wrong I am to bring you here. I have forgotten how tanks, occupied by slow-moving organisms, are womb-like. These galleries crowd with the noise of children. In an alcove, a pregnant woman sits on a bench.…

After dinner, talk turned to survival. Listen carefully, children, you said. There are forces at work in this world, melting polar ice caps, wicked hurricanes, hungry tornadoes guzzling cars, churches… even children. Dad! our parents said. Don’t scare them. You shooed our parents away. Could we cut off our own arm to save ourselves like…

At the age of eight, Martha May gave a class presentation about babies. What they smelled like. How they crawled around on stubby hands and knees. The food they ate out of jars. She made a poster with cut-out pictures of baby faces from her mother’s catalogues. Her classmates covered their ears when she played…

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.…