They find the baby on Sunday morning in the ditch beside the road. They are driving home from the vegetable stand; the salty warmth of boiled peanuts wafts from the backseat. His wife spots the baby first. She perks up and taps a long nail against the smudged window. “Pull over.” He stops the truck…

When the dreamPod™ first comes out, you will be skeptical. A device that records your dreams? Not possible, you’ll say. The magazines and the television shows and the newspaper all say that it works, that The Company’s patented technology actually works, but still you’ll be doubtful until a few days later, when the first person…

After our chests hollowed out, we filled them with birds. Humans all over the planet filled their ribcages with birds to simulate their hearts, which had shrunken over generations, finally disappearing altogether. We had evolved past having hearts but no one was ready to admit it. I kept a macaw that was too big for…

I was abducted at the Deluxe Kwik-Trip pump. Yet more proof that supporting local business has its benefits. It is not easy getting abducted, you see. It was May, and I’d been angling for a kidnapping since tax season in March. The reason: I discovered my husband’s life insurance policy. Tim is an oncologist. He…

Chris and I ambled along the railroad tracks outside Little Rock looking for clues. Two nights prior an 18-year-old woman severed both legs while attempting to hop a freight car that was headed toward St. Louis. “What we looking for anyhow?” “Blood,” Chris said, “shards of bone or clothing, anything really. Once we find that…

They could not decide how to execute the man. First, they laid the man’s head on a rock — they were going to cut the man’s head off with an axe. But then an axe could not be found. One of the executioners said, “Anyone have an axe?” and the other one laughed. Because there…

Two things I have noticed. If you place a bowl on a shelf, even high up and what you imagine to be out of the way, it will eventually contain something: a desiccated spider, a moth, a bleached ladybug. The other is that the skin receives the cat’s claws as though expecting them. The strikes…

Maybe there’s a house. Maybe it’s in Maryland — as good a place as any to live. Maybe there’s a fire, maybe it starts in the kitchen, these things happen, and it leaps from the stove to the curtains to the wall to the ceiling, and maybe the house gives into fire, and her brothers…

When I am asked if I am getting better my reply should be “No” because my symptoms have not changed.  But when somebody asks me this question they often offer such a look of concern or hope that I am compelled to answer “Yes,” instead. After I say “Yes” the person perks up so quickly. She…

First meet of the season and in the locker room they huddle slick and weightless and pray to Our Lady of the Individual Medley, Our Lady of the Flawless Back-to-Breast-Stroke Flip-Turn, Our Lady of the Plastic Lane Lines. They pray to be turned into salt water, into mermaids, into dolphins or jet engines. They pray…

Boys, you notice, have perfect hair. It sticks up in just the right way — after a swim meet, after a soccer match, after changing their shirts. You think their hair is the best thing about them, even when they wrestle, finding a thing they want in someone’s hand — a box of matches, a…

Fourteen cowboys by the fire, laying out and crouching, stinking. The herd behind them settling down. The fire eating what brush and wood they’d gathered. When they’d gathered, their dogs had found a dead man in a parched ravine. All could see he’d lately been alive, yet to be stripped of boots and belt. He’d…