When I am a little girl my dad takes me to church, and after Sunday school everyone drinks coffee and eats donut holes. I don’t want to talk to people, so my dad gives me his car keys, and I lay in the backseat with the radio turned to the country music station. Even in…

For some readers (and I am one of them), one of the best reading experiences is one that involves a certain level of surprise—not necessarily plot-related, although depending on how it is done, that can work as well. I’m talking more about surprise in the sense that something about the book subverts some of the…

The film begins with a color-saturated Polaroid that fills the screen. It’s of someone crouched next to what appears to be an archeological dig, pointing into a shallow pit and smiling, as if he had just unearthed an artifact. He looks to be of college age, or maybe a little older. He’s in a desert,…

Statutory Declaration Gender Recognition Act 2004 “I ______________________ do solemnly and sincerely declare that: 1. I am over 18 years of age. 2. I have lived as a male / female (delete word that does not apply) throughout the period of _____ years since I transitioned in __________ (month and year of transition). 3. I…

I lived six doors down from the Butcher’s Block on Ninth Street in 2005. I sauntered along the speckled gutter every Friday for five-dollar steaks and would, each time, thank Kyle profusely because we both knew Five Dollar Fridays were just for me. Returning to my apartment raw steak in hand, I would think of…

At some point we came to realize that every other tenant in this building is actually just us at a different moment in time. Some are at moments where they are older than us. Some are at moments where they are younger. The building is a long, one-story structure, and it looks like an old…

after Steven Millhauser At 2:36 on a clear, blue Tuesday afternoon, Linda Edelstein pulled into her driveway after a trip to the Pathmark. She popped the trunk of her car, took two heavy grocery bags in each hand and headed for the kitchen. It wasn’t until she reached the bottom step of her patio that…

We call up the cooks in the morning, tell them what to cook, simple as that. Donelson brought cards. I brought Mousetrap. I admit, I was aware of the President’s taste in that regard. Appropriate responses result from constant supervision. He says: “Only a matter of time now.” Inscrutable vignettes of that sort. The curtains…

When I was eleven and we lived in South America — before the government changed and my father left and my mother took up golf — there was an irrigation ditch where we used to play, even though the water was much too dirty and I was much too old. My brother had a plastic…

The Last Night of Camp is the Midnight Hike, which begins promptly at 8:30 on the mess hall steps and ends on a nearby mountaintop. We’ll corral our best songs, the stars and moon, and my most affected — public — speaking voice, all for the good of the Powerful Communal Experience. Some years ago,…

Whenever the father puts on his tree-colored pants and his blinding orange jacket, the boy knows what’s coming. Of all the places a father could be, his father prefers to be as far inside the wooded area behind the house as he can trudge in his steel-toed boots. He puts all his faith in the…

You are thirteen years old and your father is nailing a wing to the wall above your sister’s bed. You stand in the hallway, imagining a goose with a tattered bloody body dying in one of the coops outside. The whole wall shakes with the addition of four, fix, six nails, too many for a…