Her name is Indiana. Funny, you think. If you had to imagine the state, embodied as a person, she would be it. Freckled shoulders round as hay bales and long red hair straight as a state flag. She has freckles on her hands, too, dots so miniscule yet vast that looking at her always brings …
If you want to get from the St. Margaret Children’s Hospital to the Central University Hospital while avoiding the traffic or the heat or the rain outside, you take the tunnel. It’s half a mile long and wide enough to accommodate the passage of my electric utility vehicle plus a lane for pedestrians. Pipes and …
I made the announcement at dinner. “Dad is coming to visit next week.” “Did somebody die?” Mom asked, not sounding particularly bothered by the thought. “Sheila…” Thomas began. I could tell from his face, even as he pursed his lips and blew on his soup, that he too was trying to puzzle out why Randy …
In the silence engulfing us at night, there was always a question mark we left untouched. Words cut like shards of glass. This we knew through our bodies. It did not matter what you said. Even the most mundane of things—a slice of bread, grass, the rain—could be used against you. Turned into razor-sharp weapons. …
A body, lying in the alley across the street. I saw it, early in the morning, from the window of my third-floor apartment. The narrow space had been secured with yellow tape. Two men lifted it onto a gurney, then into the rear compartment of a van. I watched while kneeling on my sofa. The …
“There’s a boy here for your mother’s dog.” Franny’s father is only supposed to call her at work if there’s something wrong—and a lot had gone wrong in the last year, as her mother had become more and more ill—but now her mother is gone, and Franny assumed her father had figured out how to …
It wasn’t supposed to snow in Alabama. In fact, when Sasha and her family left Iowa for Alabama when her daughter was still in diapers, that was her first thought: no more fucking snow. In Iowa, where she went to grad school for studio art, they rented a house on a corner lot, so they …
In the middle of the night, the woman does the opposite of what she is supposed to do. While her phone vibrates with the National Weather Service warning, she puts her dog, Samson, crate and all, into the safest room of the house, an interior bathroom with no windows. She shuts the door on his …
In Florida, in a house built on swampland, Anne searches for a leak. Warm floors bead fallen water, but there is no leak. It’s just the air. Conditioned air should be dry, but not here. Here the warmth and wetness flake paint from the walls. Pink and green chips gather in cracks. Windows fog in …
No. 1 It’s an old story—a stranger comes to town. Re-enacted annually in scattered departments across the campus—the stranger from a big midwestern university system and the stranger from McGill, the stranger with the grant, the stranger who came with a partner hired simultaneously in another department—two-for-one strangers. The department would reshuffle, the stranger a …