The blast of cold air blew through our office and unmoored the various collected memos, contracts, loosely-held Post-It notes, food menus, and business cards, so it looked like a ticker tape parade, or anyway, it looked like our idea of a ticker tape parade: none of us had ever seen a ticker tape parade. None…

Put one foot directly in front of the other — the way Uncle taught you. Quiet. Don’t snap twigs, don’t clear your throat, don’t even breathe through your mouth. That makes way too much clatter and the animals will hear you coming. Keep the wind blowing in your face so they can’t smell you either.…

I was born with a chirp in my heart. My parents barely paid it any attention, but when the the sharp outline of its beak threatened to break through, they summoned the doctor. He reached into his cavernous satchel  and withdrew a small jar of bird food. “Open wide,” he said, and pushed a pincer-grip…

I’ve been sleeping with the vicar since November four years ago. The reason I went there in the first place, the church, was to get out of the rain. Years had passed since ever I’d set foot in one, though I used to go often as a girl. Later I’d go annually, just, to confess…

She’s told she has her father’s strong jaw now and stands in front of the mirror, studying it. The Fat Rabbit is in the side yard again, looking in, and she watches him watch her in the smudged reflection of the full-length mirror. Where he goes most of the time, she doesn’t know, but after…

David swung his backpack in place between his shoulder blades, then rolled his suitcases out under the awning of the arrivals gate. Cars and buses honked at each other along the curb. Pedestrians brushed by him in every direction. He breathed in deep, trying to relieve the ache in his head that had smoldered for…

Time seems to stand still in this empty house. What is it now? 1:42 pm. Across the street, Holly’s mother and a collection of middle-aged to elderly women Holly barely knows are all getting ready to surprise her. By now they will have fully festooned, swathed, and decked out Holly’s parents’ cramped house. There will…

SUMMONS Your father has been summoned to a castle. By now, you’ve probably noticed that all your stories begin this way: with your father. Don’t worry. There is an end coming to that. Soon, there will be no more stories that begin that way, though you will retell the old ones again and again in…

Every new generation grapples with similar ideas from its altered perspective. This is why, I believe, there are no exhausted subjects in literature. It’s a medium with ample room for re-discussion, re-questioning, and re-discovery. There is a wonderful tension between individual story (formed by specific experience and shaped by a particular time and culture) and…

It wasn’t the suit, exactly. It was his ease in it, the fact that the cuffs of his white shirt exposed neither an expanse of pale wrist nor a mother optimistic for a growth spurt. You see some of the boys in suits, unchanged. It has only something to do with height and breadth. The…

The cashier at the discount grocery in Grass Valley was watching her before she came in, one hand sunk in the register drawer as he stared out through the window. He looked like he was thinking about stealing, and after she walked in was thinking about her, and then about stealing again. He was tall,…

I was to bring a box of Borges’s letters to floor minus-fourteen, wing six, for virtualization. Owing, perhaps, to some glitch in the transport tube, the placard on the wall where I stood said 14/6 instead of -14/6. For the first time in my life, I had left the Literature Prefecture. I wept. From the…