During the spring of ’50, as the depth of his ambition ever deepened, Herman Melville requested “fifty fast writing youths as soon as humanly possible” to act as “tin buckets” in collecting “[his] torrents of thought.” This request, as such youths were easily found starving in orphanages, milling about wharves, thieving in alleyways, or plotting…

I landed an office manager position with the NYC Ballet, and moved into a studio in Greenwich Village. Feeling generous, I invited my younger sister up for the weekend. “Want to rub my nose in it, huh?” Sally said. That first night, she wanted to watch lions kill antelope and mount each other on Animal…

The old lady is probably dead already and I am doing nothing about it because I am busy resisting Klondike Bars. There are forty Klondike Bars in the freezer. They have taken every bit of my attention. They want my eyes on them. They are naked on the pole. The old lady is dying from…

For my comfort, they told me the details so I would know that my husband died quickly and painlessly. The arrow traveled through his eye socket and directly into his brain. Only one man could kill so precisely from that distance, they said. My husband was killed a year ago, three months after he started…

My boyfriend Daryl laces his sneakers at the kitchen table, pulling on the heel and double-knotting, like he’s headed to Athens or Lake Placid to bring home the gold. “You’re an elementary-school gym teacher.” I blow on my coffee. “You’re just jealous.” He shovels his cornflakes into his cavernous mouth. A dribble of milk leaks…

The silk merchant slid open the side panel on his palanquin. Has it come yet? Ohasu nodded, shivering from the cold, and she fell in at the rear of the file of attendants as the silk merchant was carried up the snow-covered hill to the gate. Kichiji had purchased this cottage for Old Master Basho,…

You could make it big in the field of waste extraction. Let’s face it: there’s lots of waste. Let’s stick our faces in it. You’re probably already a pro with waste extraction techniques. All you would need is a tool belt and the ambition. You can construct your own tool belt from the parts scattered…

We started with the television sets — we had them tuned to static. It took some doing to find a buzzing snowstorm, but we managed. After fixing both sets, we turned our attention to the radios. We had several in our farmhouse: some connected to compact disk players, some with alarm clocks to wake us…

His RV is half on the lawn. Who does he think he is? He’s my brother, of course. Birdman. He has a shit-load of birds strapped to the top of his vehicle. A big wooden box with air holes. He uses these birds in his magic act. He travels between Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, and…

Reuben dreams a dream. He is in his office alone with the lights out. A buffalo is eating the carpet, chewing, coughing a laryngitic cough in the dark. Reuben sits at his desk. The office is a dry place and Reuben feels dried-out. Smoke detectors make red constellations across the ceiling. Reuben looks around for…

Exhibit 5WW: Metal Canister. Discovered at Majdanek, 1944. The casual observer may, at first glance, mistake the canister behind the glass for a dented coffee can. The label is almost entirely gone, the faded gold paper clinging in shreds to the flaking, rusted metal. But if the visitor looks closely at the largest shred they…

They came at night, with long black guns, while she slept beneath her mosquito nets — stretched on her back with a type of abandon that would soon be lost to her forever. In the morning, it was over and she crouched in the stairwell, listening to grown-up whispers, knowing that something had changed the…