I wanted people to look at my face and see an equation. In the bathroom mirror, I stretched my skin. Fingers pushed together a prominent chin, the right triangle of a Roman nose. For a moment, I could sustain a fantasy. I could make my mother out of myself. On other side of the door,…

For A.T. The engine’s haphazard coughs were the first sounds that reached the villagers of P—. These were soon followed by the fighter’s final plunge into the hillside, the concussive boom knocking clay jars and the more timid to the floor. Yet it was the muted sky in the immediate aftermath that arrested the imaginations…

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” I said this to Sean, my beautiful ten-year-old with the unstoppable brain tumor. He laughed and punched my arm. This tumor, for some reason, made him constantly happy. He brought whoopee cushions to chemo. Everyone loved him, said he was so brave, that he’d win the fight,…

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…