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…

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…