In the beginning, I placed messages in RC Cola cans and left them on bus benches or in the corner of a stair at the Hood Museum. A girl is in the tower, they said. A girl is standing by the shrunken head. A girl is waiting on the flagstone steps of the cathedral. Although…

The snowman was not right. The man lay in bed, flannel up to his chin, and peered through the third story window. Outside his apartment, kids skipped in circles around the frozen behemoth. The man stared at the snowman, squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed, opened, and blinked again. The kids did not concern him, but…

An excerpt from The Accountant The day the guy walked up to me like he knew me, like I was some unruly cabbage in his garden, it took me a minute to realize he must be the guy who Ms. Foster told me to meet about the package. But just as she’d said, he had…

Summer The days are hot and the signs are hotter. Sun-baked shores are littered with shiny blue beer cans and the swollen red necks of men who haven’t held a fishing pole in years. Fishing is a sport for men’s men of course — which is why Miss Alana Mikel smiles out over the water…

Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d catch my father sitting at the bottom of the stairs, one shoe on and the other shoe beside him with its laces untied and flailed out like arms without bones. He’d be still, staring someplace, his coat beside his legs. I’d pass the stairway to the bathroom,…

I was standing in a deserted aisle of candy and dolls at Albertsons. My niece wanted a doll. I wanted candy and not to buy a doll, but it was her birthday and there was no ‘no’ in our relationship. She was seven years old, lived in another state. She had my number. ‘You need…

The mass of silvery flesh convulses in the sun, a vigorous struggle on the line reduced to a few pirouettes in the grass. The translucent mouth, lacerated from the hook, gapes for oxygen. Must feel something like sprinting a mile and having your head shoved underwater. Poor thing, Danielle would say. Why can’t you just…

Mayberry, USA Long enough without mentioning her, and she disappears. The Sheriff wants it this way. After the funeral he braces himself and their speck of a baby, the Boy, in their solid A-frame Town and lets her fade. He keeps no pictures. Forgets the long braid she twisted into a bun every morning with…

I. Two nights pass, and on the third day, beyond the smudged train window, we wake to green hills and the sun moving high. A baby cries. Children run in the aisle. The conductor roams the car, humming, making small jokes. He takes off his hat and holds the back of his hand to his…

The Job. Wake up hung-over, either alone, living in a motel as a result of an impending divorce/trial separation (she kept the house), or next to a half naked woman you’ve met/picked up/had sex with in the previous six hours (most, if not all of which, you can’t remember). When the beeper goes off a…

Coya is in the main lodge kitchen leaning against the cool wall. She watches moths tick into the electric fly catcher at the open door. Outside there’s that familiar rectangle of light, cut on the steps down. Beyond that, a square of indirect light makes a pitch of blue grass. She pays attention to anchors.…

It was after you got transferred, after the operation started, after the villagers began to leave in large numbers, the villagers whose lives you monitored from the satellite videos, the men whose beards extended to their chests, the men who hugged their weapons even in their beds. It was before you started taking sleeping pills,…