When Hudson first meets Aubrey, they bond over guns.

The symptom that first brought my father to the doctor was vague: a heaviness in the side of his chest, close to his armpit, that ached at the end of the day.

After Daniel died, Carlos came to the roadside every day and looked through the grass.

We were everybody in the kitchen together.

We invited her into the house because that is what happens when you open the door and see someone you know standing on the porch.

You press your forehead against the kitchen window, trying to see details in your garden, heat presses back like a fever.

The foreman had gone into town to spend the night with a stewardess, leaving Roy and Tommy alone at the mountain fire station with a radio and a water tanker they weren’t supposed to drive.

No one outside Nashville had ever heard of Billy Dice’s All-Stars until last night, when our drummer, Marty Marshall, fell through the plate glass window down at Clyde’s Country Corner.

Joanna is an alien; she tells me in the backseat of the Lincoln.

Elliott, my absolute best friend and boyfriend of six years, began cheating on me in November, and for the last five months I’ve kept my knowledge of the affair a secret.

I move the Darth Vader action figure next to the lemon on the kitchen table where I’m sitting with my ten-year-old stepson.

There were only two reasons a guy like me would come back to his hometown: a wedding or a funeral.

When Lois calls her mother, her tongue is heavy and tastes bitter, as if she’d been sucking on a handful of pennies.

In the Porta-Potty outside of the Dodds Park soccer fields, Kaikou rested his forehead against the toilet seat.

The wind howled through the San Gabriel Mountains and pushed right up into every crack and crevice of the chilly old mapmaker’s house.

Vi’s eyelids fluttered. Someone’s hand was on her arm, cool and hygienic.

We’ve fallen in love. In lust. In something, anyway. In any case, we have fallen.

I’m not really waiting in the car for my son / because I don’t want to see / his skeletal dwelling

During my junior year of college, I was thumbing through a women’s magazine at the dentist’s office when I came across a love quiz containing the following question: “You know you’re in love with him because…”

Victoria once learned in a science class that no two things can ever really touch, that even when it looks or feels like two objects have made contact, there exists always an infinitesimally small space between their atoms, a molecular cushion of politeness or, as Victoria came to think of it, prudence.

The mice are in the basement, caged and pegged for the belly of a snake.

“This type of thing doesn’t just happen overnight,” the man in the white coat told him as he shined a blinding light into his cornea, but Mirko was quite certain that’s exactly what had happened.

Young Lolly had a case of echolalia—though neither Gram nor Lolly knew the term back then nor knew it was a condition, an ailment of sorts. 

The letter came at a time in Lea’s life when she felt particularly disconnected from things.

K asks me to take her to the laundromat.

Last summer, my mother began the burning right after my father choked to death on a chicken thigh.

“I’m going to live to be 200,” said Riz on our first date.

August is the only month Terschelling sees a crowd.

I was never much of a dancer.

The summer I started to live on my own, I bought a pig. I bought it off the side of the interstate, hours east of the city.

I find the first dog on the street outside our apartment.

On the Fourth of July, 1999, my younger brother jumped off the kitchen counter and cracked his forehead against a claw-foot stool.

Last I hear from my sister Jorie, the poet is unwell and back in Iowa with his children and ex-wife, on dialysis twenty-four seven.

Earvin works the Flyers gas station all day, from an hour after sunup all the way through the evening.

Sal feels time the way other people feel a shower spray’s gradually escalating heat.

Go back, way back, to when you were small and unhardened.

Nothing more iconic

When I was seven years old the maid told me about a man who kidnapped a young girl.

There was once a composer. Or a critic. She did not remember exactly.

Essie tonged the jars into her mother’s old pressure cooker, seated the lid and set the timer. Through the kitchen window above the sink, she eyed the empty side yard.

Here is what I dreamt when I finally got to sleep in the early morning: Someone had taken all the eggs from my fridge and devilled them.

The trees on my street were not well.

The boy sits on his parents’ bed. His mother sits on the floor. Outside, a few soapsud clouds drift against the blue.  

The first time I had a gun pointed at me I was 14 and I ran home crying, and my brother laughed at me, calling me burra, saying I’d better get used to it. I didn’t know if he meant getting used to seeing guns or getting used to being stupid.

Josh lit a Marlboro Light and hung his arm out the passenger window of his father’s Ford Taurus.

Nothing has prepared them for the Colorado wind, which is no ordinary wind but a sudden, pugilistic wind as violent as any Atlantic gale.

After seeing an episode of Law & Order in which a mother murdered her infant child by forcing it to swallow a kitchen sponge, forty-one-year-old Todd Melkin was even more convinced that he had a tumor in his brain. 

When Colin left the House for the first time after his last treatment cycle, he said he was “going to grab some air.”

Paul sat on the toilet and held his hand out the window, cigarette hanging from his fingers. Der Spiegel lay on his hairy thighs opened to an article about the European Union’s newest member states. And then he heard it.

So, it snowed. Just a little.

By the end of my first month of piano, Miss Harry pretty much pronounced me void of rhythm and close to tone deaf but tried to be tactful in laying out my faults, not wanting to offend my mother.

Ben’s taking four residents to walk on the loose-dirt path behind the Children’s Home when they spot it: a grey parrot in a skeletal tree, the ribbon of a yellow balloon tied to its feet.

Lynn Drucker was the sort of woman who had made me reluctant to attend the group in the first place, and now she wanted to be my best friend.

Keep in mind, I was still new in town. I didn’t know people yet. I had no community here, no family. At a time when I needed to be seen, she saw me.

After Mom and Dad split up for the third time, Dad left immediately and Mom spent a record-breaking week in her bathrobe. 

We took Emmaline on what promised to be a particularly stormy night. It wasn’t hard to do, especially since all the police and alarm company people were right there in the mob with us.

They could not afford the honeymoon Alicia wanted most — mossy-hilled Ireland or terraced, pastel Cinque Terre — but she managed to find a getaway closer nearby, in Cape Meares, that would still feel far from home.

Yael’s parents ask if she has any questions, and she does, but she suspects they aren’t the right ones. She wants to know if she will have two toothbrushes now or if she will bring the same one back and forth, its bristles wrapped in shredding tissue to keep from getting germy.

They’ve finally done it, found a way to kill us all. This is how my father greets me on the phone this morning. “It’s on Channel 7,” he says.

Sometimes PJ imagined herself as an embryo, floating in a tempered glass tube in a laboratory somewhere off the coast of northern California...

“We are made of star stuff,” Alex tells me.

Mwela has a lot of theories. He tells you about them each night after dinner, after the fish fryers have cooled and the last of the ugali is scraped from the tabletops...

Everyone thinks my thirteen-year-old sister can predict the weather. 

Aiden weighed 104 pounds and the gap between his front teeth seemed to widen every time he checked with his tongue. He had a place that belonged to him in a private and warm way: Byhalia, Mississippi.

I stood between the melons in the produce section at Lundardi’s, honeydew and watermelon, thinking about the lost daughters of the world.

Shortly before Kenton Pierce discovered the bones — human bones — he flushed thirteen ruffed grouse.

They didn’t have a honeymoon.

I wish I could get out of here. The toilets don’t flush.

Alan held a map open on the streets of Oslo. It was not helpful.

I wrote Marie back. It was a love letter, a farewell card. That was over a year ago now. She responded, in a way, but then there weren’t any more letters.

I’ve been working for the mystic for almost six months now. So far, I like it a lot better than my previous job — cocktail waitressing at a strip club in North Beach called The Condor.

The first class I took when I got back was Theory of Football. It was a three-unit course, ninety bucks per unit, and it ran for sixteen weeks.

The last thing Althea needed with Owen missing was Irene nosing around.

Jon could imagine three possibilities as to why he had been called to Principal Minelli’s office, none of them good.

Things were going well with my girlfriend. Surprising, since we were both near forty and had never been married.

Millicent’s husband has gone insane.

To her, the man standing in the center of her flower shop resembled a brightly painted piñata. 

She could barely make him out. He—she was certain the figure was a he—was a fleck, a disturbance on the horizon, and—this was another certainty—he was coming her way.

Jack slowed the orange VDOT truck, lurching to a stop in front of the carcass on the side of Route 603.

Reina was six years old when her father took her up the long winding mountain road to see the dying Giant.

We started with the little things: scraps of junk, things of no import or stuff we could do without.

Imagine you've tried and failed to be a writer, and, your literary dreams up in smoke, you meet a nice man, and fall in love, and decide that if you aren't cut out to bring a unique work of art into the world, you might as well bring a unique human being into it.

Because the soles of our shoes cannot be allowed to wear unchallenged, we stand at the corner near Ma Lizzie's bakery, while Gyasi hammers curved metal heel protectors that look like horseshoes onto their clean elastomer surfaces.

When the writer Stratis Panotopoulos died, none of his editors knew it.

It’s a small town, so everyone knows. There was a trial and national press, but a couple loud conversations at the bank spread the word just as well. 

Rosemarie Ippolito is a steady ender. That’s somebody who don’t know how to jump rope but can turn the rope so that the kids who know how to jump rope can jump.

Have you heard the one about Thunderwoman? She’s my namesake. Creator made her with the heart of Thunderbird.

Legend had it, if you left your truck running in the alley behind the Thunderbird Motel, laid a ten-dollar bill on the front desk, and asked the clerk for a cherry donut, a woman would appear and take you to her room.

Sarah never said it, but she agreed with the other kids that riding on the bus over Meredith Moore’s skull felt like riding over a big rock.

The pineapple was flying! It paused at the pinnacle of its arc, weightless, and then began its descent—slow, sinking, faster, faster—finally landing with a thump into the tall grass beside the road. 

Walking through the courthouse, Newman felt like an alumnus on a campus visit. Both at home and out of place. A collision of past and present.

The cantaloupe a friend gave us sits on the table. My father, who’s visiting from California, says, “It’s like a pumpkin waiting to be carved.”

That voice. Gravelly, loud, insistent. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” yelled over and over outside Mila’s building, six-thirty sharp, mornings and evenings.

Odessa Ross, widow and owner of the Fulton Hideaway Motel, was one of twelve who survived the grocery store massacre in Montgomery, Kansas, that April, and one of seven who escaped to the parking lot uninjured...

Stu and I were the paramedics on call and the first to arrive at Rusty’s Saloon, where my Uncle Lou had died alone and upright in a booth at the back of the bar.

The ashen smell in the air reminded Ber­­­nie of trash fires in Cambodia. But then again, everything today reminded him of something else.

The first time I saw the Daijli, he’d come into Uncle Lou’s shop looking for something hermosa to hold his vino de guava.

I keep thinking something must have happened. Because you do, when people change.

We once had to make a list of all the things we didn’t remember.

We threw a Purple Rain party because we wanted to fall in love.

When Janey comes home, she brings the rain with her.

When I was a boy, firmly enveloped in those delightful pubescent years of changing voice and...

The first ricochets off the pine tree to his left and rebounds from his jeans, rolling to a stop a few feet away.

I am letting you listen to Ahmed’s thoughts. It’s important that you know this, because he only speaks Arabic, he only thinks in Arabic, and that’s not a language you understand.

You make the first move, a vague email saying something to the effect that you’re around and bored, and if he’s free, you might be free, too.

It had never been done before. No one had dared even imagine it

My recipe for mole negro has twenty-nine ingredients and takes all day to make.

I want to do this. I keep telling the body we want this; this is it. But the body has other ideas.

Arrive early on a grey-stained morning at the café she has chosen. Press your face against the locked glass door.

The cab rolled toward me, headlights and roof lamp glowing in the dark.

Bill felt such a feeling of forgiveness, sitting in his truck at the light.

They finished the dam during my last year of high school. Adam Kyle’s older brother was encased within that dam, his bones pulsating with baritone frequencies whenever they ran big water.

The cup is Alice Stout’s. It is a simple, off-white thing, one of many to be found in the cafe she runs with husband Sid.

For the eighth time today, I wonder what it would be like to kill my ex-husband.

Arianne Robertson was taking a fitful nap in her old bedroom. Hurricane Katrina had passed over the city hours earlier.

It is inconvenient being a wolf.

Because of a morning assembly and then a fire drill during first block, first lunch was postponed...

It starts as a build-up of energy that rises up from the pads of your toes to fill the space behind your eyes.

When I was a freshman in high school, my mom packed up her organic soap-making crap, announced she’d had enough, and moved into an apartment across town.

An 18-wheeler carrying ten thousand kilos of watermelons had wrecked spectacularly, spilling its cargo from a height of two kilometers, near the peak of the Tu-Ashu mountain pass that looms over the cold northern provinces of Kyrgyzstan.

Like a kid, Meredith counts down the final days of summer vacation.

You scan The Shopping Network again for the thing God wants you to buy, the thing for the troops.

“It’s not that I’m prejudiced or anything,” says Carl, like I’ll believe it.

Abigail is a woman, and I am a woman.

I thought I’d noticed her for the reasons you notice most poor children, particularly the t-shirt.

We have a secret in our family, and Bendida is it.

The beach bars were packed by eight o’clock with men drunk enough to not mind the $3.75 spent, even after we ditched them.

I walked midnight streets with Rose.

Love destroys you.