You found out one day that the man you loved was a duck. This bothered you at first; how did you not equate his words with quacking? How could you have inspired such a transition? Were you a quackologist, a webbed-foot animal whisperer? When he came to you, waking up beside you where your lover…

My wife wanted me to grow a beard. “If I could do it myself,” she said, “I would.” “But I thought women hated beards.” “Maybe I have beard envy.” The next morning I didn’t shave. I didn’t look much different. My wife kept touching my face. “Just checking,” she said. We went to the supermarket.…

John does not own a wall mirror. “Sorry,” he says “we can use each other’s eyes to know we are human, okay?” He does not believe in reflections. There are drops of semen on my lips when he says he loves me for the first time, and tears. I do not dry them. + Twelve…

A man and a woman fall in love and are married, and are happy in every single way. Then one day a flying saucer lands in their backyard, and a door opens and an alien comes out. I’m going to have to take one of you away, it says. What? say the man and woman.…

“So,” she says smiling, “do you think this guy is stalking you or what?” They are going out to lunch together. She is the intern. She is young and vibrant, if a little weird and awkward, with her interest in graphic novels, Spider Man, and him, all things he is interested in as well. He…

My father made me sleep with snakes. They were mutt snakes he’d captured in a spring-loaded Folgers coffee can out back of our trailer where the tawny grass grew patchy and bug-infested. That first night I ran around the bed screaming until both my throat and pupils bled. Dad banged the door. He said he’d…

I. On Hotel Rooms It is considered improper to answer the hotel phone when you are staying with him during his out-of-town work conferences. He may remind you of this, bleary-eyed at 6 a.m. on his way to a meeting, and you should nod, hold your tongue and try not to start a fight right…

Now, there were no secrets good or bad between Daddy and me, but once he got popped for that third DUI coming out of Highlands, he brought me into the family business of carcass shopping down around Seneca and Greer. There he showed me to the bloody back rooms of old gutted trailers and flyspecked…

Isaac comes out of the southwest exit of the shopping mall and there — right there in the very front row of the parking lot — is the largest pickup truck he’s ever seen. Mega cab, height-suspension, four oversized rear wheels, two front, it has one of those trays on the back for transporting dead…

There was a storm expected to come in from the west — snaps of lightning and leagues of rain pummeling down — and for that reason I’d taken Sam out for a good long walk. Without it, he’d spend the night crouched by the window in the kitchen, yelping at the phantoms of wind smoothing…

Losing that boat felt like death, felt like sand in my throat. Three years old, and my tiny boat was drifting away, green plastic in brown sea, brown sea that grew green and then blue and bluer in the distance, as all things are made more beautiful by their far-awayness. I reached after it, desperately,…

You were tired, that day. You were riding in a car with your daughter Caroline and Jay, her new husband, and they were arguing. They acted as though you weren’t there. Caroline swerved once, narrowly averting a collision. You bit your lip, you sighed, you rested your head back against the seat. The noises from…