They’re holding the needles poised at the tips of their noses. Cross-eyed with nervous concentration, focusing on the point, the sharp end, the sliver of metal all set to…

  When Sam’s parents had taken him to see the last remaining polar bear, they’d sweated in line for hours. Lizzie had been there, too. In the parking lot their…

  The hog farmer is grindstone apples, seek-no-furthers, he is primrose balm, mayhaw and sorrel and scuppernong butters, he is carved corn-knife handles and stocking stretchers and tiny mounted soldiers:…

  At high tide the water spewed against the toothy outcrops and matted scrubs of the low cliff around the inlet, and not for the first time the General was…

  Every Monday morning before school, we assembled in class lines in the covered playground, from shortest to tallest. On the first day of second grade, we were the four…

  The movie is a horror film. The movie is in a theater, at night. There are strangers in the theater. Your child is among the strangers, slouch- ing, in…

  He was born with a silver knife in his mouth. And he was its first victim. —Osama Alomar   Inside, the shop was limewashed and long enough to fit…

  The local news, projected to the bar by way of their staticky, cafeteria tray–sized TV, warned of severe storm conditions, possible flash flooding. That afternoon, the odd car that…

  A few days after I moved into the abandoned fisherman’s shack by the NIPSCO plant, my new neighbor Hymie gave me a hunting rifle and a box of ammo.…

  The old man woke up screaming. The nurse, asleep in the next room and dreaming of the seaside, heard the scream as a black harpy screeching toward a flock…

  He called it the new house, but it was very old. The landlord wouldn’t say exactly. He’d said it was built in 1920 or 1900 or, once, “the late…

  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…