Our mother named us after our aunts, but Dad was the one who picked our nicknames. He gave us all the names of knives, so my older sister was Steak and my little sister was Bowie and I was Cleaver. By the time I was five nobody ever called us anything else. Early on, the other kids on our block thought maybe I was a big Leave It to Beaver fan, but pretty soon they knew the score. When we came out to play on a Saturday morning, everyone fell in line behind us.

In our hearts we wished we could be something other than tough. Oh, we learned how to be girly — it wasn’t that. We bought lipstick and red shoes and miniskirts slit up the side. Boys came to the door, stammering, to take us to the movies. In tents and parking lots we bit their lips and put their hands between our legs. But wasn’t there something you were supposed to feel, when his body ground into yours?

Bowie was the youngest but she figured it out first. She was shoplifting from the drugstore when the bottles of nail polish turned bright white before her eyes. In the hospital, while they told our parents about seizure medication, she whispered to us the secret of death: that already, daily, it was stalking us. That night Steak and I relived all the dangerous things we’d done — unmarked bottles we’d guzzled from, older men we’d followed into darkened cars. The day before we would have told those stories in voices wry and ironical — now our voices cracked like sparks. We huddled together in my bed, unmoving, sheltering our little flame of fear.

He knew the places where the morels grew — under the leaf mould, on the lee sides of trees. He led me down through the buzzing woods, and I thought, a man like that I could love for a season.

My dad taught me when I was five years old. He took me to the basement so Mom wouldn’t see. He laughed because the cards were almost too big for my hands. I thought he was laughing at me. Two days later I could beat him.

I played my first real tournament at seven. I sat with Dad and five fat men in the basement of an Elks Lodge. My wrists were the width of magic markers back then; the men called me “Big Guy.” When I cleaned them out, they made a new rule that the winner had to be 21 or over.

“The law’s the law,” they said.

That night Dad explained to me that we lived in an unjust world. He left in the morning.

I kept on playing. At ten I got admitted to an illegal game in the warehouse district. I had to steal money from my mom, a little every week, to make buy-in. I told myself I’d pay it back, and I did. The warehouse guys didn’t try anything with me. I told them I was a 40-year-old with a genetic condition. I said I had three years to live. I wasn’t sure if they believe me, but they were scared of me. I was happy to make them afraid.

By the time I was 13 I was famous. All the crooks and bookies in the city knew my name. I didn’t get a growth spurt like the other kids, and my upper lip stayed smooth. Some people said I was six and some people said I was 60. Nobody liked me and everybody wanted to be my friend. So I started a gang. It was the only thing I could do.

Now I have 40 guys working for me. I have a girlfriend and a mistress and a Rolls-Royce. Nobody gets to be mayor or police chief without going through me.

So why am I on this train? Take a look at my pantlegs. They were too long a month ago; now you can see my socks. Something my dad taught me: find the source of your power. Know it, keep a watch on it, and cut out when it’s gone.

In his last days he became a different person. Lots of people say this, and they mean their bitch of a mother started paying attention to them, or their husband, his brain honeycombed with tumors, forgot their name. But my father, a lifelong painter, music lover, and general bohemian, became obsessed with shipping lanes.

He made us buy him enormous maps, coded with the ocean currents and the borders of national jurisdictions. He marked them up with complicated notations — at first we thought his mind was gone, but it became clear he had a large body of specialized knowledge. He began talking to a professor of trade economics on the telephone. He visited the hospital. My father had apparently developed a new system to increase route efficiency by 20%.

My brother thought all this was fascinating. He thought it was wonderful that, at the end of his life, our father was showing us a side we had never seen. But I felt cut adrift. After all my years of struggling to meet my father’s increasingly mercurial and unrealistic expectations, I was not prepared to mourn so practical a man.

We had to wait for hours there, crammed in a cold room with uncomfortable chairs. The only magazines were Readers Digest. We tried to make small talk with each other but it petered out after a few minutes — we knew there was no point in jumping the gun.

Finally we were called in, one by one. My examiner was a woman with a blonde bun. She administered a vocabulary test, then told me to run on a treadmill. Afterwards she set me a series of tasks, such as dropping dried beans through a small hole in the top of a coffee can. Sometimes she made notes; at other moments, she seemed not to be paying attention. When I was finished she left me alone in a hospital gown for a long time. Then a different woman came to give me my list.

We met up in a large multipurpose room in the back for juice and donuts. I can’t say I liked all my new friends at first — one of them talked too much about cycling, while another kept sniffing loudly. But I had read the pamphlet. I knew that any failing in my new friends was matched by a failing in myself, and I resolved to love them as I myself was deserving of love.

In the beginning we had six. Two were black and three were orange and one was black and white striped with bug eyes. Goldy was one of the orange ones. At first I had her pegged as the weakling. I didn’t tell the kids, but I knew the goldfish would die. It always happened with those stupid carnival fish — right after you name them, you find them floating in the bowl, their little pale bellies bloated with death. I figured Goldie would be first.

So I was surprised when Bug-eyes was missing in the morning. I asked the kids if they had flushed him, and they cried at the mere suggestion that they would do such a thing. Then I said that Bug-eyes had probably gone to a lake, and the kids spent the morning drawing him in his new home. When Blackie disappeared I said he was with Bug-eyes, but I looked real closely at all the other fish in the tank. I realized that one of them must be a cannibal. After watching them for a while I could tell Goldy seemed a little fatter than the rest — no longer the runt, she had developed a paunch. Right then that I should have separated her from the others, but something stopped me. Okay, I was curious. It’s perverse, but I wanted to see if she could eat them all.

The next day, Boo-boo was missing, and Goldy was the size of Yogi and Stan put together. She wasn’t just fat — her body was as long as my index finger, and she had big, lustrous fins. As I watched her, I swore she was avoiding my gaze. We put Boo-boo in the lake pictures with his brothers, but the kids weren’t too sad — they were as fascinated with Goldy’s size as I was.

After she ate Yogi and Stan, Goldy was too big for the tank. Her fins smashed up against the size, and she looked out with a pained expression — I know it’s ridiculous, but I swear she was embarrassed. Late at night I imagine her speaking to me: “I’m sorry,” she said, “I couldn’t stop myself.”

We put her in the bathtub, but she grew troubled. Whenever the kids went in to brush their teeth, she leapt out of the water, snapping. Then she would sulk near the bottom with an expression of extreme penitence. I started feeding her T-bone steaks, and that quieted her for awhile, but she didn’t stop growing. I started having friends over just to gawk at her. They suggested I start a business, charge admission. I started looking up regulations in our county. I looked into above-ground swimming pools for Goldy. I had to fill the bathtub to the very rim just to cover her, and she was getting antsy. I had to take my daughter to the emergency room one evening; Goldy had taken off the tip of her thumb.

It was a May morning when I found her. Her fins were splayed out over the linoleum, her head lolled to one side. Had she jumped for a tasty morsel and overshot? Or had she killed herself in a paroxysm of guilt? I ran to check the children’s beds. But they slept soundly, dreaming of lakes. I saw then that Goldy knew her limits — she saw she could no longer control herself, and so she gave her life to save ours. And even though I had already bought the swimming pool, I was grateful.

At first when the house began to burn we thought it was a dream. Both of us did, I found out later — even then, we still met every night in a landscape of our fears. I thought I saw a green-red demon laughing at us from the flames. But it was the Christmas wreath on the bedroom door, crackling in the blaze. That day we had agreed to take it down in the morning, just as we had agreed to have Christmas in our house this year, one last time.

We woke at the same moment, and we knocked into each other jumping out of bed. We had not touched this much in months. The smoke filled our eyes and made us choke. We crawled to the kitchen.

Smoke trickled up from under the kitchen door. We couldn’t tell if it felt too hot to open. We held our hands against the wood until we couldn’t stand it anymore. Then my husband reached up and turned the knob.

In the second before the door swung to, I had a single, clear thought. I thought that we would die together, here, in this house — that this was what was left for us, and it was right and good.

Of course the kitchen was untouched, we called the fire department, we divorced and I met you. But sometimes I still feel that my real life ended that night, and that all that followed has been a diversion — pleasant, yes, sometimes even joyful, but ultimately without meaning.

I got my new computer on Monday, and let me tell you, I was pretty excited. I’d been using an old Fujitsu I got from my nephew, and the thing was starting to act up — “Fatal Exception Error,” “Invalid Page Fault,” that kind of nonsense. I needed a new machine if I was going to sell my knitting on eBay.

When I opened the box, I saw this new model was a little different. I guess I haven’t been paying much attention to these things. They’ve gotten really small over the years — this one was just the size of my thumbnail. And sort of brown and shriveled up — I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But the instructions said to soak it overnight in a glass of water, so that’s what I did.

In the morning, to my surprise, the computer had sprouted. Just a little baby shoot, the color of new grass. I put it by the window and left for my book club.

When I got back it had crawled all over the sink. It was thick as my little finger now, with little waxy leaves. I didn’t know how on earth this was going to help me get on eBay, so I cut it way back with my kitchen shears and I sat down to knit. But after that I didn’t have much energy. I couldn’t think straight and I kept having to rip out my knitting and start over. Finally I just went to bed, even though it was only 7 p.m.

The next morning the computer had grown back. It was all over the kitchen window with its curling vines. I thought I’d cut it back again when I finished my breakfast, but as I was pouring out the prune juice I felt a kind of buzzing energy all through me. I could do anything. I didn’t bother cutting back the computer; instead I sat down and just did a little arithmetic on the back of the water bill. Then I ran down to the bookstore and got Crime and Punishment. Read that sucker in one fell swoop. Boy was I on a roll. In the afternoon, when I was boning up on organic chemistry, the computer stretched one of its tendrils around my wrist. I didn’t bother to shake it off.

Nowadays I don’t leave the house much. The computer has these woody branches that keep me pretty well stuck to the couch. But I don’t mind — I just sit here and smell its lovely flowers and watch the birth and death of the universe.

I’m driving to Iowa! Stories again starting August 20.

When we first got there I realized we were years, decades too late. The house was glutted, packed to the edges, bursting open like a rancid sausage. Old cereal boxes flew out the windows when the wind blew. Packages of toenail clippings pressed up against the instruction manuals for electronic equipment hopelessly buried in the mess. The living room was a catacomb. The bedroom was a solid cube of trash. All around the spills and piles stalked a gang of ugly-eyed cats.

Three days I cleaned that house, every moment vibrant with rage. I was sure I would not find a single loved thing. Even her photographs were devalued by their sheer number, the haphazard way our baby pictures were stacked up with photos of cars and unpleasant family acquaintances, inexplicable snapshots of feet. Then, atop an enormous pile of empty garbage bags, I found a little chair. I climbed up — the chair was shaky, but it held my weight. From my perch, I could look down on the peaks and valleys of trash, the cats fighting and rooting in the wreckage. I surveyed the river of foil, the cardboard peaks, the flaxen hills of twine. I saw then what that house had been — not a garbage heap, but a tiny, awful kingdom, with my mother at the throne.