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.…

The road is soft with snow. What comes before does not matter at a beginning. The house is white and quiet. Very cold and new. The house is not unclean, but it is best to begin with cleaning. Open the windows and bring the bright winter to air out what came before. Sweep the corners…

Mr. Tibberly found a meteorite on his hike in the desert. He knew straight off it had once been a meteor, but he hadn’t studied geology in school, so he decided to take it to the university meteorite lab to be sure. His life had become very lonely lately. His failures disappointed him. Possibilities flooded…

We’ll take long walks, me and Eurydice. Along the shore, watching the new souls shuffle into the grounds of the manor. They look like they’re squinting, even though this place is always overcast. The souls bump into things. With their first steps onto the gray shore, they waft like the smoke that streams from Charon’s…

Because it isn’t real, for A. For B, large parts of it take place in chain Mexican restaurants in the Sun Belt. To certain families they don’t feel like chains, of course, because such families have always lived in the Sun Belt, and have been going to Friday Night Mexican at the same place since…

The adults ate then fed the teens, and when through, they fed the children from the pans. Whatever infants were there suckled, mainly from a breast, a bottle, but sometimes the ruby lips found their way to a lock of greasy hair dipped in honey. If there wasn’t a glass, a deep bowl was filled…

I’m sitting at the kitchen table over a bowl of soggy oats, hives crawling up my neck, eyes watery and itching. It’s the cats; I’m deathly allergic. My mom brought home three last night. “Cute, aren’t they?” she says, wrapped in a white bathrobe swiped from a recent staycation with Rick at the Comfort Suites.…