When I hear the scream, I run to the bathroom expecting to find that my wife has slipped in the shower while trying to cut her toenails, her skull split in half from the impact of the faucet or ceramic soap shelf. Or I am expecting to find her lying on the imitation sheep-curl rug…

Her fingers were long and slender and too clean to be part of the human body, a thing that inevitably fails. She played with the straw in her Fribble the way little girls do, except, of course, that she was my mother. She was forty. It was the first day of summer, the last day…

Deirdre is looking into the brown paper bag. The face she has on her, you’d swear he was after giving her a bag full of fresh turds, though to be fair they don’t look like much. — Fuck’s sake, Declan, I said diamonds. Diamonds is what you bring back from Amsterdam. — They’re bulbs, Declan…

The bodies forced themselves out of their refrigerators, but we wrestled them back in. It would go on like this all night. It was not fun but it was how I made ends meet. I couldn’t think of too many jobs that were better for me. I needed the physicality of the thing. I’d have…

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…