When the doctor hands the braying baby to her parents, he tells them to think of it as a sign from God. He tells them that if you try hard enough, you can find God in most things. They try, but all they see is a human baby with a horse’s head, a daughter who…

This is the summer that Meena realizes she isn’t a heroine in one of those nineteenth-century English novels. Maybe it’s the sticky-sweet smell of popsicles or the scorching concrete between the pool and snack bar. Or the chlorine and the oily sunscreen that slicks every surface—cash register, door knob, the pool bathroom’s sea-foam tiles. When…

I heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time before I was born, sitting upright in the womb like the world’s most eager listener, my dad playing his music through speakers, I would learn later, we could barely afford. My dad, the musician, who never played Springsteen himself as though it would be sacrilegious to do…

No wax figure has ever seen a movie. Has ever complained about the exorbitant prices at the concession stand. Has ever eaten most of the popcorn during the previews. Their hands have never emerged from the warm paper bag, thin ribbons of melted wax joining their fingers to the buttered kernels. No wax figure has…

He spent his twenties the star of a bad novel. How strange and unworldly to age that way, his twenties like another planet. While the sun did a slow roll in those dimly lit years.  Was he a hero? He couldn’t tell. Just because everyone looked real, and there were bar scenes and wing men,…

When you fall asleep the ocean in your head is slick and glazed, but overnight fog rolls in. You wake to foghorns, problems announcing themselves in the muted dark. I’m here. I’m here. Steer clear. An article to unravel, data to enter, seventeen texts to answer. The warnings barely register. Today you will stub your…

The trucker liked labels, so he wrote “hat” on his hat, “oil” on the can in the vault, and “vault” on the vault itself. “You already know what those things are,” complained the man with his thumb stuck out. The trucker wrote “hitchhiker” on the complainer and pulled him into the cab marked “cab.” They…

The butcher was in a corner of the empty shop. The butcher was in a corner of the empty shop, and he was sitting and reading a novel. The novel the butcher was reading was about a bullied high schooler. The novel the butcher was reading was about a bullied high schooler with telekinetic abilities…

We begin here: Mae was late. Not only to this particular appointment, but in a broader sense: lateness seemed a part of her. As she rushed up the front steps, tripping on a flagstone levered upward by a tree root, she was flooded with the sensation that for years, possibly for her whole life, she…

Jessie’s been cutting corners all along, and we know this won’t fly in Hell Week. We’re in this musical, something about the 50s. Whenever we dance, she half-heartedly finds her spot. She flips her wrists and implies wind-milling her arms over her head instead of flying those arms and flexing those hands like the rest…

In all of the versions of this story there are dogs. The dogs roam in a pack – fifty, a hundred maybe – wild and unmanageable. The wooded area where the dogs roam is thick with brambles and nobody can get close enough to count. Nobody tries, either. Most of the dogs are big and…

It is like a lonely lighthouse at the mouth of some Norwegian fjord. It is like a lonely lighthouse set on a rocky island at the mouth of a Norwegian fjord that is leaning ever so slightly against an easterly gale. The leaning lighthouse is a matter of some concern to the little fjordic town…