*** I’ve been dazed recently, looking out the window while washing dishes, thinking about what I would want our last week together to look like. Our last week together before one of us gets shot by a stranger while we are at the grocery store, or school — I’ll have just finished a great book, […]

*** By the end of fall, the orchards grew quiet again. The air turned brittle with static, carrying the faint sweetness of engineered fruit decaying in the frost. Each tree stood still beneath the pale glow of the moons, their metal roots humming softly under the frozen ground. From a distance, it almost looked peaceful. […]

*** Summer of 2006. A man falls nine stories. No scream, no warning. Only the clean snap of bone meeting concrete. Behind the tape: me, my father, bystanders. Sunlight clung to the building’s glass, sharp as knives. Badges flashed across broad chests. Blood spread on the pavement like spilled wine, darkening in the heat. The […]

*** The dining room smelled like cinnamon and butter. Sunlight came in low through the tall windows, landing on the new maple dining table where I was setting out plates, mugs, and a platter of thick slices of challah dipped in egg. My sons Ryan and Zach had come back for brunch, their coffee steaming, […]

*** The faerie appeared at my kitchen table one bright summer morning. I barely looked up from my bowl of cereal. Not because I expected a faerie to appear, nor because I really believed faeries existed, but because it had never served me to get worked up about the unexpected. Besides, there were worse creatures […]

*** Girl chased after squirrels in her front yard, hoping to make friends. They escaped into tree branches as she circled around the trunks. She grew dizzy and collapsed into chemical coated grass. When Girl’s ego softened from the initial rejection, she collected the shiniest acorns she could find (even sneaking into Neighbor’s yard to […]

*** Iona watches the flame consume the wick. The scent label is something like soymilk and sandalwood, but it smells more like burnt sugar. The house has smelled like something burning for weeks. Long before the lighter beckoned smoke. Sloane sits across the table. They’ve nearly consumed the seven-pound bottle of wine between them. Iona […]

*** And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”  the lead singer chants again, and Angie flips her hair to the music. She’s hot and thirsty and her warm Modelo won’t help but she takes a slug anyway, leaving her breath yeasty and her mouth sticky. She grins at Sarah and Sarah […]

*** Jonathan stepped forward onto a riverbank, water rushing with calm consistency past his feet. He had been on his way somewhere, and now he was…where? He looked around, trying to make sense of his surroundings. He’d been walking down a busy road and crossed the street. He was still clutching his sketchbook and pencil […]

*** In an unremarkable patch of forest, somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, a boy sat on a ledge of ancient, lichen-covered limestone. He was alone, and he was lonely. The ledge emerged midway up a gently sloping hillside of dirt and rocks and fallen leaves, in the part of their forest that the boy’s grandfather […]

*** Sitting alone at lunch, Roberts Creek High School junior Ayana Boyd pushed cold french fries across a plate on her tray. Just two tables away, her best friend—until yesterday—Mia Belanger, laughed over pizza and a soda with her new boyfriend, Jayden Sanders. Ayana had seen his post on SPEAK, a popular new app. Crude […]

*** This year, the valley’s come early into bloom. Not just early, wrong. The village consists of a fistful of houses that cling to the hillside, trying their best to keep from sliding down into the river that slices the valley’s gut. The paths between houses aren’t really paths—just places where feet have worn the […]

*** “Do you believe in magick?” asked my friend one afternoon, while studying in our university library. Having recently seen Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, my Instagram had transmogrified into somewhat of a public grimoire: a red candle with waxen words engraved, an assortment of tarot cards, and innumerable crystals appeared in the foreground of […]

*** All her gremlins have names. They are so ugly, some of them, with mean little faces and fangs and pokey tails and off-kilter wings. But they all share a part of her chaos, each imbued with some form of her haphazard energy. Sculpting the little devils out of clay keeps her hands busy and […]

*** I hated the way Dr. Payne made eye contact with her laptop more than with me. I don’t know what they teach in medical school these days, but it doesn’t take a genius to know it’s not a good idea to tell an old man grieving his wife of fifty years that he has […]

*** Following an all-nighter, my chief summons me to ask after Mr. Corrigan, a fifty-something-year-old with COPD who’d presented at 2 A.M. with a bowel obstruction. Touch and go, I tell him, surprised by his interest. Can I get him off the ventilator and out of here quickly? he wants to know, because my patient […]

*** When I pick my son up from school, he smells of seaweed and salt. Crouching down next to him, I ask, “Why is your shirt wet, Jake?” “We have a whale in our classroom. We think it’s a humpback, but it could be a Southern Wright whale. Ms. Donald is going to look it […]

*** There is truly no way to describe the Other Place. That’s because everything about the Other Place is always changing. Even its name, if you glance upon any sign or roadmap, will be different from moment to moment. Its population is both sharply dropping and rising; a baby is born and dies every second. People have their happiest days and their […]

*** The smoke drifts skyward as I wave my feather above the dying embers of sage. Slowly, casually, twisting, winding, up, up and ever, up the smoke twines. The dusky, earthy smell of sage hugs my nostrils and tendrils of my hair as I begin to circle the earth. My bare feet know what to […]

*** I can’t explain music. I can’t read it, don’t know the names of the notes, or even know the names of most instruments. What I do know is that the tinkling of piano keys evokes visions of crystal-clear streams for me, and the crashing of drums calls up images of thundering waterfalls. I don’t […]

*** One When I’m too young to understand the meaning of things, I watch a movie called The Entity, which is about a ghost that haunts a woman and takes control of her car when she’s driving and keeps attacking her until ghost catchers get involved, trapping the spirit in ice. When I bring my […]

*** During dinner, Ahma’s dentures shot out of her mouth like a carp slipping off a fishhook, landing on the tile with a wet slap. Under the harsh white light, they gleamed strangely, jaws opening and closing. Brown sweet-and-sour sauce leaked from between the teeth, trailing a sticky path across the floor. Her gums, now […]

*** It was the quiet that disturbed Jasper. Fresh snow usually had a distinct and peculiar silence to it, but that night a heavier stillness crept over the fleecy pale and curled around his cabin as if it were alive. From his room he listened to the chambered hush settle over the western woods and […]

*** My eyes linger on the train window, the landscape a blur that brings the promise of the unknown, the possibility that something hidden might be found. It’s the waterfall, spotted in a moving car, a brief break between trees revealing a vista. A blink or you’ll miss it. Something out there even when all signs point to bleakness. This […]