He makes a happy face out of Gummi Bears on a bright yellow plate and gives it to her. Red ones for the smile, a green one for each eye. You know this because you sit in your dark room every day staring at your laptop. You see when she posts it as her profile…

Outside, the sunlight has faded and in the valley it’s too dark to see or search the ground. Dew collects in the trailer’s corners and seams. Another day’s chores are finished. Jesse sits dead center in the floor, rattles the spray can and squirts forest green into the end of a sweat sock. Three hard…

1 The black dog faces me off. He stands firm, legs splayed, at the top of the park carriageway. I look around. There’s me, the dog up ahead, and one other lady who walks past with a ball thrower and her own dog close at heel. I look again. The black dog stands his ground,…

A sidewalk by my house just ends. Shel Silverstein had them pegged, sidewalks, especially in the case of the one by my house. The city came one day. They built a line of sidewalk down my street but then didn’t finish the job. They didn’t connect it to the street. It leads to a length…

We were all worried when father lost his job. Father put his fist into the living room wall. Mother found the cigarettes she hid away when she was pregnant with me and started smoking again. Bessie cried, but she was two and she always cried. I was afraid, but I knew father would think of…

“Janie, look at me. Janie, that was the agency. Look at me. Janie, they said we’re approved, we’re on the list, we’re going — oh god would you look at me?” The distance from here to the frothy top of the waterfall would not be what one considers far if looked at horizontally from downstream.…

My father bouncing his leg to slow rock music with me on one knee, telling me I should keep a special place in my heart for my teeth, to remember where I lose them, on the playground like he did when he was my age, fighting a friend named Bobby-Joe. Or else I could lose…

Charlie takes a shortcut by the park, which is draped with a green carpet on the north side, the only direction moss will grow in, and since we have time I ask him to pull over. He wants to get on toward Raleigh in case there’s a line to pick up our badges, which will…

When Rachel finally gets pregnant she will stop drinking for nine months and will be a responsible mother, money dedicated to diapers and prenatal vitamins and an espresso-wood crib and a thousand techno-gadgets to monitor the baby’s every breath. But for now, so long as it doesn’t affect the fertility treatments, she will continue to…

Constance Weatherbotham woke up wrapped in unfamiliar linens and screaming but thought little of it. Alone on her first night in the woods, it was only natural to be frightened. And her husband Richard was dead. Drilling equipment through the temple. Mistakes happen. And the baby curled up and expired in her stomach. Unfortunate, but…

Our grass is long enough that you wouldn’t see me from the street. Blades scratch. Redden the skin. It’s maybe an allergic reaction. Every night a headache knocks me flat. They might kill me. Three MRIs and no doctor knows where the headaches come from. We have chickens named after queens of England. They cluck…

When I think about Da, that late November morning in the park, I see the horizon line bouncing up and down smoothly and seamlessly. Da and that man called Adam huddled together, standing next to a park bench in black overcoats, rising and falling with the horizon… below the horizon… all of it locked and…