Today we mourn our great leader. A loss of great consequence: how hungry our stomachs, how boring our stories, how cold our campfires will be. No one knows when…

  Dolores, nearing the end of her second ambulance shift of the week, sits in a plastic lawn chair outside the back of the fire station. Between calls she often…

  By the summer of 1993, my father had had enough of the war and decided it was time for a vacation. “We’ve been locked up for two years now,…

  the labor nurse said, He’s got hair! while Todd looked between his fingers from across the room and I wiped the fluid glistening off Nicholas’s pink forehead, touched his…

  This is a work of fiction.   Raymond and I walked through the prison yard—from the back classroom, along the chain-link fence bordering dirt sports fields, down the long…

  According to all the usual rules, the goat wasn’t allowed on the mail boat. But the captain would make an exception just this once for the new lighthouse keeper.…

  Her mother had become a vegan. She rhymed it with “pagan,” like it was a religion. Which, the daughter thought—she shook the limp herbs dry—it was. They were making…

  The baby was stealing my sleep. “Only three days old, and already a thief,” I said. “Don’t be silly. This precious angel?” My mother took her from me, making…

  A knuckle—a woman’s, I guessed—tap-tap-tapping at the kitchen door: exactly what we didn’t want to hear. Hello there! it seemed to say; it was not the kind of rap…

  Winter. Violet light, frozen ground, the sense that his marriage was over. In the term’s last weeks, while his seniors soldiered through a unit on short stories, Hollis Martin…

  I   Excursion, corrects my father, who is a hunter. He is standing over a basin in our shack, pressing freshly butchered venison into salt, and the finger he…

  In the official texts that the villagers had permitted me to read, there was never a strict age requirement. What mattered was that the candidates were elders—re-tellers of stories,…