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…

In the second summer after I left home I’d made it as far north as Mendocino. When I arrived at Russian Gulf I stashed the bicycle and my two pannier bags before walking into town for coffee and a maple roll from a diner called Adelle’s, then made the weekly call to my mother and…

Leland lived alone above the Laundromat. Across from Aubuchon’s Hardware. Adjacent to Jack’s, the mill bar all the guys went to after the whistle. I met Leland at another bar in town. Flying Dutchman. Don’t get caught coming out of there, they tell the new guys at the mill, unless you want to get your…

“Hey,” we want to say to the people beside us on the train, “have you ever been to Ocean City for the Night in Venice boat parade?” We know they haven’t. We know that nobody goes to Night in Venice unless they live at the Jersey Shore like we do. We know that people don’t…