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…

In here, loss is different. I learned this on my first visit. After I signed in at the front desk, I passed by a waiting area, where I saw a pregnant woman sifting through hunting and car magazines. Next to her, an older woman inspected her fingernails on one hand and rested her other hand…

Everything is covered in shit. When the birds first arrived, everyone was taking pictures. Jimmy and I rode our bikes down the streets, pointing at houses covered in starlings. They looked like oil slicks spreading from roof to roof. The trees were filled with their chirping babies and the sky would occasionally go dark when…

The enormous old man strode across the meadow through the snow. Where the meadow met the woods there was a dead deer hanging from its neck by a rope someone had tied to the lowest branch of an immense oak tree. The old man didn’t know what kind of sign it was, this thing left…

The maladies started the day after the Emperor was crowned: First a small sneeze. Then a cough that trembled his ribs. Soon a brightness burned in his throat and flared up to his eyes. From there the maladies grew. A twitching brow. A receding hairline and an itchy scalp, the latter producing dandruff that dusted…