When Freddy became a robot, a special map appeared in his mind. It alerted him to obstacles and told him the fastest way from here to there. Instead of waiting for the elevator one morning, he flew down the dozen flights of stairs, careful to leap over a big puddle of urine on the landing…
It was my first time teaching. I was nervous about it. My husband had a bottle of Malbec that a student had given him, so he opened it. It tasted awful at nine in the morning, but I drank the whole bottle before going in to teach. I did well in class that morning. I…
It’s music night at Mihalis’ taverna, and the musicians wait for the darkness, for the desperation of the cicadas to quiet. They’re the loudest they’ve ever been, everyone says, and the noise is all anyone can talk about. But compared with the last topic of conversation—the fires—it’s an improvement. Mihalis is Aspa’s father, and she…
It fell to Kyle to kill the chickens. On Saturday before dawn, while Audrey was still asleep, he put on an old t-shirt and jeans and headed out to the coop in the backyard, hedge clippers in hand. It was a cloudless, cool morning, but though the horizon was still dark, the hens were already…
I. Monsters “Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming. Ava studies Kiera. How she holds her hand steady—as if used to slicing herself…
The golden toad is extinct. It was last seen north of Monteverde in the elfin forests of Cordillera de Tilarán. The pools where incilius periglenes would breed dried up and its eggs desiccated. For those who may have hatched, a crueler fate awaited. Their life sustaining water incrementally drawn down before the metamorphosis from nascent…
I have often paid the price of sleeplessness for my father’s crimes, the crimes of all of Germany, though I had never set foot in that country when I again encountered the idea that became so compelling to me in the summer of my thirteenth year. On a scorching August evening in my fortieth, I…
By this time next week—and possibly sooner—I’ll be just another man who abandoned June. I’ve outlasted most of the others and in some twisted way I’m proud of that fact. I never “gave my all” according to June’s impossible standards but at least I tried. The fact that I’ve come down here to Disney World…
Pillsbury Avenue, addiction row—a whole street of mansions close to downtown, long ago abandoned as tax write-offs and turned into treatment centers, methadone clinics, job centers, halfway houses. I parked behind her building, 1950s four-story stucco with steel-framed windows and rusted white metal awning above the front door. Across the street a tortilla factory, Mexicans…
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