The beehive hung from the roof of their motel room, and nobody could reach it without a ladder, and nobody was coming out until tomorrow. “The bees are sick,” the manager said, his cheeks shiny and red and his white face blown up like bubblegum, “it won’t be much longer till they die.” The bees…

In the kitchen, the girl’s parents told gruesome stories: children’s teeth lassoed to door knobs, pick-up trucks, and the tails of family dogs. The removal of baby teeth was an extreme sport. Cheese sounded kind in comparison, until the girl saw its blue-green crevices and sniffed an odor that also suggested crevices. “Won’t it just…

I wake under a spider’s web of wires to the sound of monitors—blip, blip, blipping. I look at a camera hanging from the ceiling and give a half-hearted wave. It must be the middle of the night. I hope it is, but before I can close my eyes again, I hear a knock at the…

Annalise was having dreams about picking flowers late at night, from the private gardens of residents who were likely too asleep to notice. She imagined them waking up the next morning, taking a headcount of their tiger lilies — those were most popular this time of year — and noticing that exactly eleven were missing.…

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…