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…

Stephen and Laura sit at their shared teakwood desk. Stephen notices how the light from their 24” LCD monitor falls velvet on Laura’s cheek. They sit with bluish monitor light dancing in their eyes and lament that there are certain items they’re unable to purchase on eBay. The list is long and they have arrived…

A burning in the crevices of the crotch, trousers damp and reeking with a week’s worth of wear, feet rotten with mold — these conditions don’t bother me so much, but fingernails overgrown I can’t abide, and mine grow fast and thick, quick to yellow with chalky flecks, perhaps indicating yet some other deficiency. It’s…