1. It’s always been my habit to keep a couple of square snap-shots housed in the clear plastic windows of my wallet. I like how those small faces glimpse out when I casually open the wallet, whether it’s to finger out a business card or a five dollar bill. “This is Cheryl,” I’ll say, noting…

Three miles separated the couple’s home from the juncture of the great highways. The woman had once seen the interchange from above. A helicopter ride with, of all people, her priest. They wore headphones with microphones but still had to shout. There was excitement then, the interchange new, and with its cut ribbon came promises.…

Excerpted from the newly published collection Fractals For Emily Dickinson LET IT BE AUTUMN. Let it be another town. Let the houses be lowrise, undistinguished, a mix of old and new. Let the doctor’s surgery in a terraced sidestreet be new sandbrick with a porthole window and double doors, and thick brightly-coloured metal bars at…

About the bloody pair of shoes on her fireplace mantle, she said, “Those are the shoes I lived through the plane crash in.” I was picking her up for our first date — blind, determined by a sophisticated algorithm on Match.com — and had been waiting in her living room, sipping ice water out of…

Tonight, I built a kite. I taped together chopsticks we’d saved from every order of Bang Bang chicken to make the frame. I wound and glued fat string to make a bridle on the spine, stretched a white garbage bag across the chopstick skeleton, and tied on tails made from a pair of my old…

On Pine Street, there is a dog that takes himself for walks. His owner, a short, thin, balding man with larger than average ears, opens the gate to their yard at 8:30AM. The dog, a Newfoundland, big and black and hairy, walks out unleashed. The man closes the gate and goes inside. The dog walks,…

I sit alone in a booth without windows. In front of me, a computer. Next to the computer, headphones. When I put on the headphones, I hear voices: sometimes one, sometimes many voices. A rough transcript of what they’re saying, the product of speech-recognition software, is already on the screen in front of me. I…

The seal is dying. They’re all dying. Maybe a thousand are left in the world to sun on volcanic beaches. But this seal is dying as we speak: a rock juts from its skull. The seal bleeds as we snap pictures. What does a seal, a dying seal, make of our bright floral prints, our…

When the doctor comes out June is in the process of deciding whether or not the active suspension of fear is required at this juncture. The task is familiar: mornings as a child she climbed into the car and placed her hands beneath her thighs, the highway a necessary danger. Her mother is the sort…

Paula said she was afraid to venture more than waist-deep into the water because she didn’t swim. She and Evan had driven off the main road and found the enclosed beach. If she were flying above it in a plane or if she were a bird, it would look like a turtle with its front…

Dusk swallows the harbor. No stars or moon yet, making the sky a dull, purplish thing. Behind him, over the sea wall, the city lights are flickering on. He can tell by the glittering patches on the waves, static and unnatural. He can tell by his own shadow bending awkwardly over the shore, submerging into…

I only had one friend. Guncha Epstein. Nobody liked Guncha because she was adopted from Turkmenistan and didn’t smile very much. She said Americans smile too easily and that smiling so much is crass in a world with so much suffering. She talked about her Turkmen people a lot, how they kicked out the Peace…