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…

The living room was empty except for the girl with pigtails and the going-away card she wanted us to sign. “Not now,” we said with bottles in our fists. The room’s orange glow reminded us of tanning salons and taxidermy. We made for the kitchen and found the corkscrew, the bottle opener, glutted on booze…

When I lived in that house I always used to look outside, and that day when I looked outside I saw where they left the baby. The baby’s parents were gone. The moment dilated. I tried to think about whether this seemed irresponsible. I thought about the question of what does and does not coo.…

We — those of us at the academy with money to burn — wanted to go to town. Of course, we always wanted to go to town, would have always agreed to go, whether we had money or not, because somebody with money would surely take pity on us and buy us something, but moreover…