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,…

  My grandmother, Daddi, kept calling her dead husband to bed. On the night of the funeral, Daddi looked for him in the folds of her velvet blanket, the hollows…

  The story was dangerous ground, I knew that instantly, and the little voice daring me to tell it a certain way should have stopped me before I started. C’mon,…

  Prince George’s County, Maryland 1986   Goatman lives in the woods: the woods behind your house, but also in the woods along Osbourne Road, and also in the woods…

  Nearing the end of my father’s sabbatical year in Florence, my mother convinced him to rent a house in the mountains. She slipped the Holiday Homes brochure on top…

  It is believed that Mr. Leon Levitt of Peridot, Arizona, began to emit sometime around his forty-third birthday—“emit” being the retroactive clinical term ascribed by those of the science…

    The trees seemed to hunch closer as darkness fell. Something—a mouse, or maybe a squirrel—emitted a high-pitched shriek, and Marta startled. An owl, she thought. The notion of…