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…

The buck lopes down the last stretch of hillside and bounds over the low fence behind the industrial park, hardly slowing, legs tucking up, body stretching out and arcing like an arrow, then coming down soft on the other side with just a faint ticking of hooves on the asphalt. The man stops and considers.…

Davis chooses her for her scuffed eyes, which as he lifts the trash can lid meet his own with a look he can only describe as imploring. She lies prone, embedded between a wad of paper towels and a heap of moldy grapefruit skins, her arms reaching up: get me out of here. As he…

The old fire eater sits in a truck stop eating his lunch: egg sandwich, fries, a cup of coffee. He’s out, terminated, downsized, “I’m sorry, Silas. We’ve had a good run together, but people today, you know, they just don’t… we’re just heading in a new direction,” no severance, not even a ticket home. After…

It was Fresh Family Farms day. I was a pig on hind legs, a woolly pink giant, but the girl’s mother wanted a picture. She posed us in front of the 60-roll packs of toilet paper. I did my friendliest pig pose: one hoof resting lightly on the girl’s shoulder, the other perched on my…

They’re stopped in traffic, just south of Hartford. Jenny, driving, is complaining about her mother’s vacuum cleaner. Dirk wants to listen to the World Cup pre-game show, buzzing in the car’s tinny speakers. Maybe, he thinks, I can ask her, very nicely, to be quiet. Something huge explodes into the back of their little car.…

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.…