Sixteen thousand applications received by the new school; two thousand selected to write the entrance exams; three hundred ten-year-olds invited for the admission interview; me finally getting my turn after waiting six hours. These are the numbers I remember. Three of us at my primary school wait four months for the list of successful applicants…

The boy massages the brush into the soap cup, building the lather white and thick, and spilling over the rim onto his thumb. The lather is warm and he can just feel it. He sets the cup on the edge of the iron stove, the brush resting in the cup. He opens the razor carefully,…

You’re fairly certain that a sudden ability to see other people’s pain as colors isn’t listed as a potential side effect of Evalia, the new arthritis drug prescribed by your doctor last week. The day after you first punch the pen injector against your thigh and feel the viscous liquid bruise its way into your…

Ian laid down to sleep on the grass and when he woke up he was human again. Lana had laid his clothes out in the usual grove: a tie, a button-up shirt, and slacks. Nestled next to the clothes were his loafers, cashmere socks balled up inside. He dressed quickly, although his hands were no…

My mother never eats cherries, she is afraid of the pits. She isn’t afraid of swallowing them, but she thinks that worse, they have something inside of them. She says that her grandmother had a line of cherry trees on her property, and that they were all in perfect symmetry. “That’s one thing about nature.…

The sunset’s almost right. From peach it slowly turns crimson, leaching the colour from the sky overhead as I press my cheek against the cold window. Down the road I notice the boy with the baseball cap — I can’t see which team, I don’t know any — folding grey wadges of paper and pushing…

He said he’d give me a lift home from school and led me outside to his canary yellow convertible parked in a no parking zone, the top down in defiance of the season. “Don’t you love this crazy weather?” he asked. Tornado season — just after winter’s thaw, before summer’s splintering wind, polar air collided…

The skies were sunny and clear on that spring morning, perfect weather for flying. It was to be a quick, simple flight that Martin Crane had taken a half dozen times. One big city to the next, two states apart. Flying time: eighty-five minutes. Martin’s single carry-on bag contained the daily newspaper, a paperback book,…

When people used to ask her, she would tell them about the egg. It was Philadelphia, 1993. A heat wave scorching through the city like blood rushing to the head. The egg had been left out in an alley on the south side, right under the sun. She tells folks how she peeled her way…

First, as always, truly open your heart; ask. What if the voice answers? Now, open your eyes. See the white church gray in the night. See the empty flowerpot halfway up the back steps. See the backwards stained glass. If headlights bloom like ghosts in the distances, simply be still. No one else will see.…

There is no wilderness to speak of anymore, save for the mountains where the wolves and centaurs live. No humans are allowed up there. A few years ago a child got lost, or was taken there, and the wolves ripped her apart. Now no one goes beyond the barricades. It’s for safety, the city councilors…

People had been talking about it at school — little survival kits that you could carry with you wherever you went, and how they could one day save your life. There had been a report on television of a girl who had used it to escape after she had been kidnapped. She had cut the…