Our neighbors have picked up a firework habit. It’s emotional regulation, they say. Never mind the burn bans and drought, the sleeping children and anxious dogs, the calls to the police and the subsequent fines. Their son aces a spelling test? Roman candles. Their daughter goes on her first date? Sparklers.  Their father loses his…

Starting soon after her mother’s death, five flashes of light began to shine through her bedroom window, every morning at five a.m.  The first time it happened, she was in a reoccurring dream in which she walked through a dark forest, arms swinging, body so weightless she sometimes floated.  In her dream the night sky…

Doctor Hornicker adjusted his instrument and examined the eye again. He hadn’t been mistaken: within the dilated pupil he could see the universe laid bare. He considered whether it might be a trick of the light, and was conscious of the lunch that still lingered on his breath. “It’s perfectly natural for our eyes to…

The Hoffman’s central employee at the candy store was their son, Gene. Post-collegiate in age and with a number of partially completed degrees, Gene had sampled a wide range of occupations without finalizing a commitment to any: hotel groundskeeper, stand-up comic, phlebotomist, dog groomer, volunteer police officer. To Gene, life was a series of masks—we…

Dick loves the powerful engine. Jane the safety. The twins love different things about the bright red wagon. Alice—the new car smell. Andy—opening and closing a window with the press of a button. On sunny weekend afternoons, Dick washes and waxes the car, nodding as he polishes the chrome door handles. He was right to…

A low-grade hum from outside brings you back from your thoughts of leaving. You run to ask your wife if she heard the noise. But she’s not in the bedroom or anywhere in the house. Nor are the kids. You phone her sister, see if your wife showed up there. The line’s down, but you…

December made her realize what she was doing. The slick, icy tongues of winter slapped against her bare legs as she waited outside Donovan’s apartment, though he only went by ‘D’ online. D, 45, three photos, one video, immediate match and message to follow. It was not like summer, when nothing could rupture the fantasy…

“It’s Heaven,” Kana’s uncle said, hands proudly on his hips while I watched the movement in the water, “for people who love sharks.”  Kana had insisted her uncle raised “sharks” in this pond tucked in the middle of a Japanese mountain range. But at only around thirty centimeters long in what had to be fresh…

One afternoon when my kid Sam was seven, he walked in from the front yard with another boy about his age, maybe a year or two older. This other kid was skinny, with dark hair and eyes, in a plain blue t-shirt, jeans and ratty sneakers. I said, Who’s this? I’m Nila, the boy said. …

Sulfuric acid. That’s what Mrs Thomasin was thinking about when the phone rang: sulfuric acid. She had heard somewhere, perhaps on the television, about a man—a killer—who had used the substance on his victims. The acid as she remembered it caused a sort of liquidity, dissolving the muscles in half a day. She didn’t want…

My wife’s family is now my family, too. We are four months out from the miscarriage.  After a long, ear-blaring flight, we land in the country of my wife’s origin. From the hotel, we take a bus two hours outside the city to a dusty town. To a wilted house, to my mother-in-law’s. For dinner.…

I only remember the log house as a cold place, a steady chill whistling through apertures in the chinking. My sister and I shared a room there—the north half hers, the south mine. Her window looked onto a fishpond and a split-rail fence, mine onto a modern scarecrow—an inflatable tube man dancing in the distant…