Carla was the one who put them up to it. She found the old wedding dress in the bottom of her mother’s trunk, and made Beth hold still while she pinned it in the back. She picked the white flower for Ronny’s buttonhole and used a wet comb to flatten down his hair. I just […]

It was so cold I didn’t need anesthesia. I slit the seal down its dappled chest, and I slit myself in the same place. I felt no pain, but I had to stop to catch my breath — I could feel that I was almost out of time. When I could fill my lungs […]

After my father died, my family fell apart. We didn’t fight about money — dad didn’t have any — or about how to dispose of the body. We fought about Dad’s last words. We all knew he’d lifted his head, clutched my mother’s hand, and said something to the four of us. That’s where the […]

When I die, I think I will return to my childhood house. A number of people who have lived there before and since will be sitting in the living room, waiting for me. Mr. Deng, who sold us the house, will pour me a lemonade. Mrs. Deng will offer me a chair. They will introduce […]

I was down here in the dark water before any of you were born. I was here when you crawled down out of the trees and scrambled to the seashores to fish. I was here when you first ventured out on the skin of the waves, and when you grew fat with self-love and turned […]

We tried everything to keep the cold out — plastic on the windows, towels shoved under the door. We burned up all our wood and then we started burning summer clothing: baseball caps and T-shirts and bathing suits that sent up an acrid smoke. Still in the middle of the night we woke up shuddering, […]

She sleeps in my brain, curled like the fetus she never was. As a child I played with her. I told her stories. I offered her cookies and dolls, and pretended she declined.
When I turned thirteen, I cowered before her. In all ways she was greater than me — taller, more beautiful, faster on […]

A few months after my older brother left for college, I began seeing copies of him everywhere. Standing in line in front of me at the drugstore, walking a dog when I went out to get the paper, waiting to cross the street as I walked to school. I saw them at the pier […]

I don’t wash my hands after handling uncooked chicken.
During thunderstorms, I go out with my umbrella.
I hike through tall grass with my legs exposed, or camp with food in my tent.
When I hear of an unsolved murder in the city, I stay out late and come home all alone.
I’m not suicidal, and […]

Four weeks we waited in the mountains, living on roots and rabbits, watching the horizon. The younger recruits were beginning to despair when Leo came back over the ridge, new clothes on his back, smiling. The others slapped him on the back and opened our last bottles of whiskey, but I was wary.
“Good news,” he […]