1. A man and a duck walk into a bar. The bartender says, “I’m sorry. We don’t serve gorillas.” “This isn’t a gorilla, he’s a duck,” says the man. The bartender replies, “I was talking to the duck.” The man and duck sit quietly for a moment. Somewhere in the distance pool balls collide. Finally,…

“It wasn’t the mall,” I hear Jessica say. “He left her at a Safeway. Tied up in the trunk of her car.” I hear this from a distance, just as I hear the drone of the boat’s engine and the echoing sound of a soda can being opened by one of the men on the…

Le Pue sat on the patio of a café, drinking lemonade through a striped straw. Le Pue’s legs were crossed, one knee over the other. Le Pue wore leather loafers and tailored white pants. Le Pue, of course, could not be seen. Le Pue could not be seen, and so Le Pue could not order…

When I saw the hand amid the Johnny Jump-ups, I assumed it was another weird lawn ornament like the angel babies the new super installed — until the thing began patting the ground as if searching for lost keys. Then a second hand popped up and the two of them scraped the earth, upturning clods…

When Kehoe, the landlord, comes looking for payment he drags in clay from his fields, all over the kitchen floor, and if I did that Ma would go apeshit but she says nothing to him and makes me sweep it up. He’s a tall, lean man with dangly arms and hands twice as big as…

Your husband walks into the kitchen carrying two knives, the kind with long blades that can slash through raw meat and thick vegetables as if they were Jello. You have no idea what he’s up to. And you don’t ask. He is tall and muscular, a man who chews his food deliberately and swallows decisively.…

Frozen birds fell hard and bounced in our yards, brittle feathers frosted to sparkling. We came out bundled in the cold, gathered the birds in barrels to keep them through the winter. The children, never so gentle, bent over and cupped the birds in their palms. The elders laid the birds on the barrel floors…

There’s only so much you can do to prevent it from happening to you. Sooner or later they will take that which you value the most; they will take your accent and there will be no marker on you anymore, no stamp to say you are from somewhere else. You don’t want to be like…

The broken boy they pulled out from under the Mercury in the rain that day wore a tee shirt that said Solemn Grove Towing and Auto Repair. It said something like Henry or Harlon or Harry or Dale in small print cursive on his chest because that was his name, but no one ever called…

My teeth, they grow sharp, so sharp, like those of a bear or weasel. Every day a little sharper. I run my tongue along the edges and marvel at their shape. I have been out here for many sunrises, creeping through bushes and trees and scrub with Matty Fletcher always at my side, closer than…

On the day my granddad died, I went down to the basement to be with his body. It was quaint down there, dusty cinder blocks and high windows, like a bedroom on a concrete yacht. There were empty wine bottles and books with broken spines and cast-off paintings, all of it chalked in long-ago smoke,…

Etheridge has a hole in his head, or at least that’s what he says. It is a shifty son of a bitch, the hole, slithering from place to place, opening and closing like phases of the moon, and it won’t give him a moment of peace. Any untoward movement could send his brains sloshing out…