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…

Herman played with his G.I. Joes in the backyard. Technically, he played with his Cobras in the backyard because he only had the bad guys, the bad guy base, the bad guy vehicles. He liked the bad guys best. The good ones were so normal looking, Duke the blonde-headed leader so like Chad Simpson, who…

Dark skies today he says and she says I love the look of clouds and it has been so long since she has said anything that he isn’t sure how it all works. He sits. He stands. He turns around and closes his eyes and opens them and she is sitting there, her knees above…

S Even though I’m silent, my mom puts her finger against her lips as Dad yells. He’s upstairs at the front door, directly above us, yelling I hope at neighbors, not investigators. They’ve been in front of our house for at least five minutes. The basement Mom and I are hiding in smells like wet…

She hated mountain driving. The mountains might fall, snap, at any given moment, rocks and dirt and trees tumbling. Or maybe just a shift, a closing in, the mountain sides narrowing the road, so that she held her breath, curve and curve again, nausea building. He didn’t seem to mind. He drove fast, confident, and…

It started so easily, a single October second, the movement of tendons and bones that felt habitual within Thomas’s hands, not theft but an action without judgment, nothing more than the transfer of metal and leather from one dark place to another. It was something others could have done at no expense, the kind of…

It lasted only a few moments. When I surfaced there were soft murmurings. I wore the only good dress that I had, a purple pastel with little sea pearls sewn around the collar. My husband went under after I did. I wanted to be first person he saw when he opened his eyes. I wasn’t,…