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…

I lived in a house full of things that would one day belong to me. My wife was a blind goat. I was waiting for her to die. Out here, there are stretches of land where you can go for miles and miles and find only blank space between towns. It’s a Northern country and…

1. You must stand near the radio, startled as the urgent tones of the broadcaster bisect a soap commercial. We interrupt this program. Why? To announce — “ — that February 13, 1946, will be remembered as an historic occasion. Yesterday the wartime alliance between the United States and Russia was made permanent, and it…

And, then, the sloughing off of the lizard-boy’s skin, the abandoning of husks. With each shedding, the hardening of scales, the darkening color. The mother’s deepening fear of her only child, of what he was becoming, what he would become. Slovenly, wild dogs rife with mange roamed about the trailer, sensing the wild within. How…

I’ve returned to Iowa to complete a purge of my childhood home. My dad is a dermatologist, and he’s going on a two month trip to El Salvador to volunteer at a rural clinic. It’s the kind of thing he’d never have done before, with his fear of parasites and lumpy pillows. But things are…

It was Clint’s idea. Megan mailed him things lying around their house — the stuffed raccoon they bought their dog on his birthday, a tube of Megan’s lipstick, a tin of stale mints, half the contents of a junk drawer. It took these boxes two, maybe three weeks to get from Baltimore to Afghanistan. Clint…

Fifteen zoo animals got loose the Sunday that Tom died on the train tracks. His grandmother thought it was fitting, a metaphor for how her heart felt. Tom’s football coach also thought it was fitting, but because it represented the team the boy had been a part of — an unstoppable force. The escapees consisted…

My mother brings the crocodile home on a leash. Its mouth takes up more of its body than its tail. It’s the same green as the jade beetles I liked to de-wing in preschool, and shiny like metal. My dad asks, How much’d she cost? It’s a he, my mom says. And he costs what…

Some things I don’t like talking about, particularly things that lay me bare, like if I talk about them I’ll see something in myself that I’m trying to ignore. Other things I don’t like talking about because I don’t want to remember them. And talking about things is more than just remembering them. It’s like…

#10 Eliot was not like other angels. Finding heaven dreadfully boring — what with no smoking allowed and no harmonicas, only a monotony of harps and halos too constricting around the skull and awkward wings arousing muscle spasms shedding tiny feathers everywhere — he volunteered himself as an emissary and caught the next train homeward.…