Drabbles

A drabble is a short story of exactly 100 words, with a title of fewer than 10 words.
They’re interesting exercises in how much story you can tell in about a minute.

 

1

Emotional Support Animals

She’d always thought she’d been blessed with a naturally high metabolism. When the doctor told her it was a gift from tapeworms, she was conflicted. If she evicted them, would she balloon? Willfully abandon her defining feature: her enviably sharp angularity, her alarming and unusual narrowness? But this anemia was no joke. She felt constantly fatigued. And the trouble with breathing alarmed her. Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be dewormed. But a few months later, once her skin glowed youthfully pink and her breathing steadied, her features began to soften. Alarmed: she went on a diet of strictly steak tartare.

 

2

On the Grid

He lashed himself to the precious, old growth tree in protest. For twelve days, he survived on bottled water and granola bars exploitive television producers traded him in exchange for footage. He spoke eloquently of conservation, suffering with wholesome pride. Loggers cut down everything around him, launching sawdust and pulped shrapnel into his beard and skin, ensuring his canonization by growing legions of fans. After the news vans rolled away, he climbed down in the darkness, exhausted. His cedar was executed promptly after. The book he wrote about his experience devoured seven hundred acres of pine with its first printing.

 

3

Two Triplets

A year after they were painfully separated, they did it. Their wounds closed under shiny, rubbery ridges, their worlds each a lonely expanse where they could both breathe in without feeling the other exhale. At the tattoo shop, they waited, hand in nervous hand, two shards of shattered mirror. Identical and oppositional, warped echoes: they grew stronger with each reverberation of their own voices. But in devotion and denial, they slept side by side, aligning their keloids best they could to fill the void. Along the meridians of their scars, they paid the artist to engrave: HERE LIES OUR BETTER.

 

4

Lost Miracle

No human had even seen it, ever smelled it, ever studied it. It had no footnotes in any compendium of biology. No Wikipedia entry. No genus or species noted or translated into Latin. But there, and only there, it bloomed in the shadows of a doomed forest. Grey, plump, fragile: barely an inch tall at its most assertive height. Its spores contained a compound that could cure any mammalian disease so profoundly that the effects of its consumption might be mistaken for immortality. A combine plowed it under before it could cast its seeds of unheard hope into the wind.

 

5

The Heart is a Muscle with Memories

He introduced himself to her, and presented a bouquet of roses. She seemed flattered, and invited him to join her on the bench. He smoothed his white hair with a heavily spotted hand and asked her coyly about herself. She flirted shyly, sat up straighter as she spoke. He smiled at her with his entire face and offered to take her to lunch. She said that she would like that very much, and that she hadn’t been on a date in quite a long time. They’d been married seventy years. He visited her every day, and he always brought flowers.

 

6

Cursing in a Lost Language

Two thousand years before he put the ring on her finger, robbers stole a golden sculpture, a sparrow weighing four ounces, from a dark and hidden tomb in sunny Egypt. The bird was melted and forged into coins. All who exchanged them met painful and premature ends. One coin made its way to Italy, where it was hammered into earrings. The earrings were stolen from a head in a guillotine basket, and melted into the ring. She felt strange as soon as her wedding concluded. On day two of her honeymoon, she fell from the top of a Ferris wheel.

 

7

Disowning

He was so wealthy he graveled his driveway with ruby cabochons. He threw away his regally tailored clothes after a single wearing. He employed an army of servants, and kept an army of soldiers ready to fight for his whims. He could not imagine why his son would run away, what would motivate a departure from the paradise he called home. When the prince was located, his father was horrified. He was living in a slum, unwashed and clad in grimy rags. He explained in a letter, “I don’t want to ever feel filthy again. I won’t be coming back.”

 

8

Overqualified

It was a lonely job, minding the aquarium at night. The place hummed with only the sound of the water filters. No children giggled or rubbed their greasy faces against thick glass. No docents droned on about habitats and water temperatures. He turned off all the lights. Checked that the doors were locked. He sighed. He was getting to old for this. He should be somewhere else, snoozing, not doing this job. The salmon circled their tank. The otters were curled up around each other. All was well. As he cursed his fate, the octopus climbed back into his tank.

 

9

Converted

He’d never been to a psychic before. Didn’t buy into that spooky stuff. But his aunt did, and she insisted he visit the medium. He knew better than to cross that woman, the unchosen, undoubtable leader of his family, so he found himself in a dim room, across from a wonder with inky eyes and a divine smile. She moved her hands like water around a quartz sphere. He suddenly wanted to believe. “You’ll have three children,” she said, “Though we’d wanted four.” And he leapt across the table, shattering the globe. As he embraced her, he sealed his fate.

 

10

Tossed & Found

He’d found so many things in the shore. Mostly coins and links of chain, rusty nails and bottle-caps, but sometimes he found treasures. Old gold coins or sections of necklace chains. When his metal detector blinked on that windy Saturday, he poked his shovel down and found exactly what he feared he’d find. The ring was simple, fourteen carat gold. The hand was intact, all the fingerprints easily identifiable. Missing for a month, he knew as soon as he saw the smooth band, that he’d found his wife, knew he hadn’t sailed her far enough away from the hungry shore.

 

11

Family Business

It was a job that allowed him to stamp his passport in the service of others. But it was draining. He was the only adult in the world known to have his specific blood type. But those who needed transfusions of his rare gift were scattered across the planet. Because of international laws, blood cannot be shipped across borders, so he legally transported it in the container of his skin. When his son turned eighteen, he was somberly told that he did not need to attend college, that his job was to exercise reasonably, eat well, and travel the world.

 

12

February Second

He had one day every year when he was allowed out of the laboratory. He knew he should look forward to his excursion, but the role he was forced to play was insulting. He sat in his crate in back of the van and looked with damp eyes toward his chaperone, a gentle man who often chatted with him in the lab. “You’d think that being the world’s only immortal, omniscient rodent would earn me at least a seat belt.” His friend stroked his nose and sighed regretfully, “Just pretend you see your shadow, and then we can go home.”

 

13

Motivations

On his college application essay, he made a list of the things he hated about his life. That his car service passed so many sleeping bags on the ride to school. That his bathroom was bigger than his best friend’s apartment. That his sister had only been on the organ donation list for an hour while others withered on dialysis for years. That he’d been given probation instead of years of jail when he was caught driving drunk in Midtown. He wanted to major in philosophy, concentrating on ethics. They admitted him, hoping his father would bestow a serious endowment.

 

14

New Toys

She unnerved other girls. Her gaze was penetratingly steady. Her voice, no matter how deeply she felt the words, sounded emotionless. There was something both calculating and awkward in all the ways she moved. But on the archery range, she seemed impressive and serious, not cold and stiff. Archery helped her ascend from the uncanny valley and find a purpose. Her fellow army recruits never suspected that she was anything other than focused when she impaled bulls’ eyes. Her aim was otherworldly. Her developers beamed with parental pride as her sisters stiffly stepped off the assembly line to join her.

 

15

The Voice He Wished He’d Heard

His first shame. It smelled like an urge ignored for hours. It felt like cold, wet clothes. It sounded like snickering children’s disdain. It looked grossly expensive: the cost to empty and clean the entire ball pit. It burned like his mother’s look of frustrated disapproval. He hadn’t felt it in years. Knock-kneed by the vivid intensity of the memory, he fought back. He scooped up his damp son, whispered that it was no big deal, that there were fresh clothes in the van, not to worry, these things just happen sometimes, that he loved him so much, don’t cry.

 

16

Eating Well

The little cow escaped her pasture and spent several weeks wandering the quiet acreage inside the forbidden zone, a no-man’s land between the farm and the quarantined power plant. She ate grasses imbued with a chemical frequency she elegantly remixed via digestion. When she returned to her designated fields, she slipped back into the herd, and her adventure, boring as it was, went unnoticed. The ripples of her excursion would change human history, for anyone who ate the veal of her future children lived to be three hundred years old, though that longevity could never be traced back to her.

 

17

Orphan’s Explanation

Mom told me that Dad had run off with some heathen vixen from his cycling club, but the truth of it was a lot less sexy. On the twelfth mile of what he’d hoped would be a thirty mile ride, Dad had tragically encountered a few wet and mossy rocks and lost control. His skull bounced on the sharpest one of them before he rolled off the trail and into the soupy pond where gigantic catfish with transparent skin slunk through oily silt. His bike sank slowly. Dad floated for about a day. The fish didn’t nibble through the bike.

 

18

The Fall of the Town

The flames licked at her bare feet while she strained against the rope that bound her hands behind her back. They said she could converse with wolves. They said she could knit with lightning. They said she had a tail that held pens for signing deals with demons. They watched with ravenous eyes and smug mouths as the flames grew. The snickered as her dress began to smoke. They cheered as embers singed her braids. They did not hear the wolves approaching. They saw her smile form and they stopped having fun. Everything that they’d said about her was true.

 

19

Last Wishes

He sat on the edge of the bridge, legs dangling three hundred feet over the rapids. It was near midnight under a clear sky, and he hadn’t heard a car cross the bridge in over an hour. He didn’t want to do it, but he knew he had to. This was the only place he could possibly be, the only place that felt right to do it. He unscrewed the cap of the urn and turned it upside down, repeating the action his sister had taken the week before. This time, no one would scoop her out of the water.

 

20

A Common Risk

It was something between a mistake and an accident, not punishable as a crime. He’d only looked away for a moment. At the radio, at a billboard, at the pizzas he was honestly too tired to be delivering? Something small. He heard the thump on his hood before he saw her. Heard the windshield shatter before he slammed the brakes. A hundred years-old and wandering in the Minnesota darkness, along the double yellow lines of an icy highway, in a gray bathrobe and slippers. Now he travels everywhere by bicycle, afraid and unwilling to ever again pilot a two-ton bullet.

 

21

Blooming

The corpse flower had been lurking inoffensively for seven years, and it had finally matured. She was determined to experience the full, putrid glory of it. She’d read the blooming would reek of death, like rotting meat left out in the sun. Her husband sneered at the concept, called it disgusting. She went to the greenhouse alone and found that the line to see the plant wound round the block. “See,” she sniffled, “I’m not so gross, not so weird.” By the time she’d reached the entrance, she’d emailed her divorce attorney to tell her she was ready to file.

 

22

Decolonizing

She was a seventh-generation Martian. Her colonizing ancestors had come to Mars from Ohio, by way of some forgotten somewhere else. She no longer resembled that pale and lanky couple. She was squat, orange of skin, thick of bone, and vulnerable to their diseases. She and fellow Martians resented the implication that they should welcome new, obnoxious colonizers, and so staged a united rebellion. They turned off the radios. Let the Earthbound think they’d succumbed to something deadly. And when fresh capsules plopped down on their planet, they pummeled them to keep themselves quarantined from invasive microbes and Midwestern accents.

 

23

Yeast Infection

He had an infection in his small intestine, where he didn’t feel it, where he didn’t notice it, where the yeast thrived in darkness. You know what yeasts like to do: eat sugar and excrete alcohol. He’d been unknowingly perpetually drunk for years, though he never had a drink, as he didn’t like the taste. He was a sleepy, easy-going, uncoordinated guy. He was a goofy friend, a terrible driver, a guy who slept eleven hours each night. His infection got him promoted, endeared him to his colleagues and family. And eventually, silently shut down his liver and his heart.

 

24

Archimede’s Letter

She liked him. She really did. He was sweet and funny. And he adored her because she was, too. But she had scholarship offers and a vocabulary that made him flinch. She wrote essays he didn’t understand and made allusions to historical events he thought were storylines from television shows. She knew he’d never move away and there was so much of the world she wanted to see. She knew that if she chose him, she would give up everything else. And so she circled the word no on his note, folded it neatly, and handed the lie to him.

 

25

Bone China

He turned on the kiln when he arrived at his studio. He planned to throw at least five plates on the wheel that morning. He planned to glaze them later that week. There were four delicate bowls that had dried and were ready for firing. And, of course, there was the clay in the freezer: that precious media infused with bone, to make it stronger and lighter at once. Pitchers of his old lover’s kneecaps and femurs, vases of his tarsals and vertebrae. Soon, he’d have a complete set of dishes. The evidence of his crime: he’d serve dinner on.

 

26

The Incubators

He told the doctor he’d been running a low fever for weeks. The doctor said it couldn’t be too serious. He showed the doctor his fat, blue tongue. The doctor said it was just his imagination. He had the doctor palpate the lumps that felt like concrete grapes blooming beneath his skin. The doctor told him he was just getting old. He showed the doctor what had emerged from one of his wounds. The doctor gasped. And over the next two weeks, the doctor ran a low fever, his tongue turned blue, and a thousand eggs matured under his skin.

 

27

You Can’t Collect on a Horse You Bet Against

They packed all of his things into garbage bags with a note demanding that he turn away from sin, that he apologize for all the shame he smeared across their family name, that he immediately begin to live as the opposite of who he truly was. When he read the note he wished he hadn’t, and spent the rest of his life trying to forget the words. Forty years later they read about him, saw how successful he’d become. Learned about all the good he’d done and how cleverly he’d done it. He threw away the letters they sent, unopened.

 

28

Unnatural Assumptions

When the woman moved to the neighborhood, cats began to disappear. Once a development haunted by dozens of tabbies, soon the streets filled with birdsong. Her neighbors pointed sharp fingers at her little house. They left angry, anonymous letters in her mailbox. They threw trash on her lawn. They hissed at her like the ones they’d lost. Her tires went flat repeatedly. The woman put her house up for sale. But long after her departure, sparrows still nested without fear. Meanwhile, in the woods beyond the subdivision, an eagle slept in a nest lined with collars, some with tiny bells.

 

29

The Unsellable House

Her bills were set to paperless auto-pay. The gardeners came every other week. Her lights went on and off on timers. She was the last of her cohort of elderly friends, and her children, who lived in different time zones, weren’t exactly fond of her. If her lawn had fewer acres, a neighbor might have noticed the smell. Maybe, just maybe, if anyone had noticed her absence, she wouldn’t have laid on her kitchen floor those long and painful days, aware though unable to move. But no one noticed, not for five months, when her bank account finally ran dry.

 

30

The Crooked North Pole

He looked over his long list of names and snorted with malevolent delight. He detested the poor, with their grimy begging and undignified wailing. He sneered at their wants and laughed at the naïve lists they sent to him. When they poor ones sat on his lap, he cringed as they soiled his velvet suit with the invisible filth of poverty. He lavished his generosity on the rich ones, the ones with flush parents and warm rooms of their own. Before he hopped into his sleigh, he tossed the letters of the poor ones onto his hearth fire, and cackled.

 

31

Showing Some Teeth

Every morning, he would be there, loitering at the top of the steps where she exited the subway, demanding transactional smiles she never paid him. She wore sunglasses, even on rainy days, so as not to give him even the satisfaction of her eye contact. She didn’t slow her pace or change her expression around him. She worried he might know where she lived. The last day he accosted her, he unwisely jaywalked to shout in her face. She heard the screeching tires and the thump of his body under the wheels of the truck. Only then did she smile.

 

32

End of the Marriage

His skin was gray, wrinkled, speckled with many darkened spots of age and moles that resembled fungus. The room was thick with the stink of his rot coated tongue, his vinegary feet, his greasy forehead. He was short, frail, with a crooked spine and a hairline invisible in front-facing portraits. His teeth floated in miasmic water in a cup beside his bed. Her eyes watered. She had never seen, and would never see again, anyone more beautiful, more precious, more perfect. She kissed his cool forehead before pulling the sheet over his slackening face and rising to fetch a nurse.

 

33

Symbiosis

The old man had tended the koi in his pond for thirty years. Feeding them sublime pellets of lovingly rendered food, policing their water quality in the pond, watching them with admiration and wonder every day while the rest of his life remained mundane. And then the otter appeared. Evicted from her habitat, she was ravenous, thin. And the then koi disappeared, one by one, in two weeks time. When the man saw her, she floated, satisfied and unafraid of him in his empty pond. Knowing his work had done them both good, he sighed, and tossed her another fish.

 

34

Responsibility

His parents trusted him enough not to hire a babysitter that night. He’d never been trusted like that before, and that night he sat on his soft bed, eating ice cream from the carton, watching movies featuring animated and forbidden nakedness on his computer, feeling happier than he had ever been before. With his headphones in, he didn’t hear the glass shatter. Didn’t hear the footsteps. He didn’t notice the man noticing him. Didn’t hear the struggle down the hall. When the boy’s parents got home, his little sister was gone, and he began his life as the prime suspect.

 

35

Rubble

She heard the earth shudder before she felt it, thunder from everywhere. As the building began to shake, as the books jumped from their shelves, as the light fixtures fell, as the dishes clattered from the cabinets, she ran. She raced down the stairwell before it collapsed like a wrong hope. She excited the building before it crumpled into the parking garage. She was out on the street before the Richter scale calmed to zero. And she knew, hoped, he would never find her now, not if she kept running, and let him assume she had never left their apartment.

 

36

He’s Really Something Else

He was composed, rather than conceived. His parents invested their trust and savings in the doctor’s work. The technicians spent months knitting bits of DNA together to make him possible. That he was even born was seen as a miracle. That he enjoyed an issue-free childhood was even more impressive. And yet: none of the scientists realized that when he reached puberty he would undergo a transformation. When he began to build the cocoon around himself, everyone was perplexed. While he slumbered inside it, all were worried. But when he emerged and unfurled his leathery wings, he thrilled the world.

 

37

The Atheist Chaplain

He cradled his newborn daughter, alive four hours and now dead two, and forcefully demanded of me with red, pleading eyes, “Why?” In response to his visceral need for affirming narrative, I spun him the most beautiful and comforting story I could (without any preparation), “Well, it simply takes too much energy to rule a full dimension all at once. On the other side of time, a magnificent princess, who will bring peace and joy across a universe, is cooing and smiling and warm, and her power is ready to improve an entire eternity.” He spat at me. I left.

 

38

The One

The three-legged one-eyed foxhound once bit through the ulna of a one of his bullies and was rewarded with a slab of steak stolen from his stepfather’s freezer. When the girl he’d adored with heartsick insomnia for almost a decade made a disgusted face at his animal, he exiled her from his mind and his life. When the dog did not wake up, he wept until he was dehydrated. Years later when he briefly considered owning another dog, he felt a pang of guilt so deep and so hot he fell to his knees and begged forgiveness for his infidelity.

 

39

Assumed Positions

The sergeant strutted to the car, gun drawn, hot on adrenaline, ready to do his kind of justice. The windows were tinted octopus ink black. He saw only his own pink and sweating face in the driver’s side window. He announced himself and demanded obedience. He knew what he was dealing with. This was not a respectable driver playing respectable music. Not the kind of driver he could just let roll a stop sign. The window didn’t lower. He was seething, offended. He fired through the glass. The sergeant had no idea his own son was an accomplished car thief.

 

40

Princesses of Daytona

Every third place finisher automatically has two foes. Marie hated Sandra and Tabitha. She hated those trashy usurpers to her throne. She hated that Sandra’s fake eyelashes were made of real human hair while hers were bits of sharp polyester, like a toothbrush. Marie hated that Tabitha wore her real teeth on every stage, while she had to wear flippers, and tried not to sputter her words over them during the talent section. Sandra and Tabitha hated pageants, and planned to run away together, change their names, abdicate their plastic crowns, be happy instead of royal, and safe from Marie.

 

41

The Opposite of Envy

Once, there were two sisters: twins with curly hair and loud laughs, stubby fingers and small feet. One was a housewife with five tornado-like children and a rumbling cumulous cloud of a husband. She loved ephemeral things: newscasts and fresh snow and coupons and laundry that couldn’t stay clean for more than a day. The other was a technician who lived alone in pristine silence. She loved dense things: German chocolate cake, ancient philosophical arguments, and her geriatric bulldog. Each thought the other had been cursed with a fate worse than death while being deliriously smug about her own circumstances.

 

42

Learned Entitlements

The monster waited under the box spring. He knew what he had to do. He heard the creaking of the mattress. Saw the light switch off. He waited until the whole house was quiet before he crept from his lair and climbed up onto the pillows. His hot breath grazed the child’s ear, and he whispered his spell for three hours before returning to his hiding place, “You are the best in all ways. You deserve everything. Whatever you want! The whole world is yours to do with what you like.” For it’s a monster’s job to create more monsters.

 

43

Long-Term Gains

They were desperate for money. All the bills were due at once. The taxes, utilities, insurance. The acres they owned were flush with tall, second growth pines that kept the understory in constant shadow. The logging company offered thousands for the timber, a sum that would solve their current and future monetary problems. But the murky seas were rising and the air was getting so stranglingly warm and heavy, and so they bravely declined the offer of chainsaws and open skies on their property. They knew this was the only way to survive, their only insurance on any fragile future.

 

44

Fitting In

She was afraid to fly. Not afraid of the possibility of a gruesome, horrific, gravity-induced death. No, she was afraid of flying because of her size. She was afraid someone would angrily complain that her warm body gently touched theirs. She was afraid the seats would be too narrow, the judgments too cruel. So when she was seated next to a wiry man, she feared the worst. He’d have her kicked off with the voice of hatred she heard in her head, only louder and someone else’s. Instead, he smiled at her, shared his chocolates, and became her dearest friend.

 

45

Acceptance

On her left hand rested a blue diamond, thimble-sized and worth more than most castles. While her skin crinkled and her veins rose like gnarled roots under wet soil, the stone remained magnificent, intimidating. When she met the one her son loved so much, she passed it on. “I know men don’t often wear such rings, but I’ve looked at my hand every day for over thirty years and known that I am deeply loved. I want you to have that reassuring, lustrous feeling, too,“ she whispered as she pressed the jewel into his palm. He wept with grateful shock.

 

46

Re-zoning

The cottage had been abandoned for twelve years. Layer upon layer of graffiti stacked up on the boards over the windows. Its weary roof sagged. The exterior was shrouded in feral shrubbery and the interior wore a lining of dampness and mold. But the land underneath was worth a fortune, seeing as the cottage was the lone remaining eyesore and specimen of craftsman architecture in a neighborhood of buildings full of million dollar condominiums shaped like shipping containers. The night before the bulldozer came, twelve people packed up and fled the cottage. None of them knew where they’d live next.

 

47

Undermining

When he told her that he was deeply supportive of the society working to end animal cruelty, his stepmother bought herself a fur coat. When he told her that he was saving up to buy a house, his stepmother bought herself a third one. When he told her he was canvassing for a local politician he believed in, his stepmother sent a bloated check to the candidate’s rival. After his therapist pointed out the pattern, he began to tell his mother the opposite of everything he wanted and believed, transforming her pettiness into a force for good in the world.

 

48

Dying Breed

The silver cup seemed bigger than he was. Somehow, Rex had managed to snag the title of Best in Show. He’d walked proudly, had performed so perfectly. Had the best coat. The phone calls started before he’d left the awards platform. How much to stud? Name your price. Rex loved the work, but he was terrible at his job. His aim was true but he fired only blanks. Scandalous. Shameful. The cups seemed tarnished. The blue ribbons sagged. Rex’s proud strut slowed to a mopey shuffle. One day, a friend called: “Rex, you’re depressed. Know what you need? A dog.”

 

49

Lost Soul

When the well-respected neighbor accused her of repeatedly and brazenly tempting him with her unshaved legs, her mother called the priest. After much debate and dour observation, an exorcism was performed upon the girl. But the spirit driven from the child was not a demon. The banished spirit was the one animated by hopefully joy and carefree movement, an optimistic soul that did not comprehend all the possible flavors of shame. What remained was grim. It hid from crowds, hunched and sullen, fearful of future admonishment. The priest declared the operation successful, and the girl’s mother filled his collection plate.

 

50

Repayment

His furnace, he knew, should have been replaced decades ago, but being diabolically frugal, he’d only do that once the grossly inefficient thing broke down for good. He religiously fed the crows, a happy habit that earned him the ire of his pale neighbors, but the love of the black birds. One night, his ancient furnace began to emit carbon monoxide in dangerous quantities. The corvids cawed their alarm. They shattered every window, sacrificing many of their own to save their benefactor. In the morning, when he saw the mess, he vowed never to feed those strange, spooky creatures again.

 

51

Company Morale

When crying was inevitable, she fled to the handicapped stall on the fourth floor, where, after the last round of lay-offs, all the cubicles sat empty. She was there, drying her eyes, when her boss stormed in. He rapped his fist on the stall door. Barked, “Enough with this crap. Your deadlines aren’t moving but you’d better be. You have thirty seconds to get your ass back downstairs and finish that report.” When he was found dead the next day, dangling from a rafter in his garage, she wondered why he hadn’t sought the sanctuary of a handicapped stall, instead.

 

52

Anything, As Long As It’s a Thing

If she wanted a glass of milk, it appeared on her nightstand. If she desired an extra blanket, one would appear on her shoulders. If she saw a toy she liked, it became hers. Other children had mothers to conjure those gifts. She had only her mind. As she grew, she acquired more grown-up items. Silver bracelets. Extravagant light fixtures. Fine wines. No one knew how she had everything but money and love. She shared her sorcery, setting tables and filling wardrobes for anyone who would befriend her, if only they could find her bottle, rub it gently, and ask.

 

53

Leaving Marks

After receiving the diagnosis, she went to the bank and asked for her life’s savings in twenty-dollar bills. The money fit into a single envelope. She’d never been paid enough. Over the next weeks, until she was too weak to travel, she rode the bus from one end of the city to the other, stopping into every library branch the metropolis contained. She sought out her favorite books, and placed bills as bookmarks on her dearest passages. She wanted her fellow readers to have a little something, to give them another reason to open as many books as she had.

 

54

Should be Somewhere Else

The whale was as long as the school bus she was supposed to be riding. It was as big as the scream lodged like a beehive in the back of her throat. The whale was as slippery as the words he had said to her while she tried to squirm away. Gulls pecked at its skin. Waves rudely slapped its limp tail. She rested her hand on the side of it, felt a vile coldness. Furious, frustrated, she kicked the thing. The world was so mean, but she could be meaner. She refused to be beached, and left to rot.

 

55

Warped Mirrors 

His insecurity kept him out of the sun, away from bars, and on edge. He haunted the skincare aisle of the drugstore and an elliptical machine in the basement of his building. He owned three illuminated magnifying mirrors and six drawers of serums, creams, potions, and supplements. His gray hairs tormented him. His wrinkles animated his dreams. His perfectly manicured hands shook with worry while he smeared anti-aging lotion into every pore of his body. He smelled like jars of hopeful science. Everyone, it seemed, flirted with him, but he meekly assumed the winks and smiles were acts of pity.

 

56

Served Cold

If anyone asked why he wasn’t attending his father’s funeral, he would tell the story of the bowl. His father despised the pet turtle. Cursed its smell and the way it looked him with slippery eyes. Resented the way the boy doted on the thing. Hated the boy would be late for everything because he was constantly fussing with the damp reptile. One morning, the boy noticed the empty aquarium, and at the breakfast table, found his cereal served in a fragile, wobbly shell he recognized with horror. His father gleefully forced him to eat every tear-salted, fishy-tasting corn flake.

 

57

Promotion

After the bus accident, most of the varsity team came to practice on crutches or wearing slings, covered in bruises. They were in no shape for the tournament. But Aristotle was fine. He’d been sitting alone, in the front, and somehow managed to avoid injury. No one on the team admired his gentle cleverness; he was too small and delicate for them to accept as one of their own. But at the tournament, as he and the rest of the junior varsity team nervously took to the court, the entire school cheered for him anyway, because he wore their colors.

 

58

Perseverance

He knew she was cheating on him. Knew that she and his brother were blissfully undermining his entire life. He’d known it for years. And he hoped it would end, that it would fade into the ether of the past, and that he would never have to talk to her or his brother about it. That one day, she would look at him the way she used to, like he was the one she wanted. His wish was granted, the day he was dredging pine needles from the gutters. She realized, clearly, his silent devotion, and fiercely chose him again.

 

59

One Detail

She arrived in a waiting room that reminded her of the department of motor vehicles. When her name was called, an angel behind a slab of bulletproof glass barked, “It seems you’re not eligible for eternal bliss, but you’ve accumulated too many points to be hell bound. How do you feel about a re-do? You get to go back to your old life and change one thing. One! Tell me what that is and your re-do will begin. Here, fill out this form. Next!” So she wrote on the form, I’d like to be born female, and aimed for heaven.

 

60

The Muse

When he retired, he took up painting. He translated emotions into brushstrokes and mixed poetry into pigment. He would slowly carry himself up the stairs to his attic studio and dance back down them. For years, he perfected his skill and honed his happiness. When he died, he left all of his work to his daughter, who he hadn’t seen in many years. She had no idea he’d been a painter, or anything else about him, honestly. Inside his attic, she found hundreds of luminous, gorgeous portraits of herself. She knew she’d never been half as pretty in real life.

 

61

Wolf-Mother’s Care

When her son stumbled into her house, covered in blood at three in the morning, she knew what to do. She’d done it so many times before. She helped him limp to the bathroom. She threw his sticky clothes into the washer, along with a generous serving of bleach. She put the coffee on. She made up a bed for him. She pulled the drapes to dim the moonlight. She set a plate of raw hamburger on his bedside table. “You know it happens every twenty-eight days, Henry,” she shouted at him as he showered, “You should be more prepared.”

 

62

The DIY Internship

The senators chatted quietly in the mahogany lined back room, sipping scotches and fiddling with golden cufflinks. They lounged in tufted leather chairs and laughed comfortably at the escalating offensiveness of their old jokes. The waitress refilled their glasses with her phone set to record in her pocket. She offered many close-lipped smiles as payment for their crude flirtations while they traded billions of concessions back and forth. It was impossible to get a job in journalism without connections. At the end of her shift, she had four hours worth of audio: more than enough for that coveted entry-level position.

 

63

Scout’s Honor

All seven girls sat in a semi circle around the campfire, moving as the wind changed directions and sent smoke into their eyes. They were closer than sisters, knew each other’s worst sins and would never tell them to anyone else. They planned to hike up to the dark, bottomless well the next morning. Each one had one heavy garbage bag in her backpack. They’d toss their horrible trash into the mouth of the well to ensure their secret stayed kept. It had been tougher than they’d thought to cut his body apart, but they’d managed to do it, together.

 

64

Longevity

She had joined the clinical trial as a last resort, and she’d been on vacation ever since. The company that offered the drug was long bankrupt. The doctors, long dead. Ninety years after her last dose, she remained healthy. Her hair grew black. Her unwrinkled skin: radiant. Her back stood straight. Her friends had all passed away. Men with half her wisdom bought her optimistic drinks. She didn’t know how to be. Eventually, she did what she thought would help her fit in. She adopted a tortoise: and together they lived for hundreds of years. She never did her taxes.

 

65

Immigration

When she got angry, she went for walks. She took her phone with her, so she could get messages of apology before she returned. But not this time. This time, she left it on the counter. She could not be tracked. She could not be apologized to. She could not be cajoled into returning. She left her wallet, too, for the same reasons. She took her passport, though. She lived far from the border. She was that angry. And she stayed that angry. As posters with her picture faded, she bloomed. She stopped being angry, once she finally felt safe.

 

66

Homesick

The older a house is, the more likely someone has died in it. Her house was nine hundred years old, a country estate in a foggy, dim corner of England. Her best friends growing up were a child covered in plague boils who taught her to knit, a dandy in a frayed velvet coat who taught her to dance, and a herd of goats who’d been sacrificed to ensure plentiful harvests. When she moved away from that home, she found the rooms she slept in too quiet, too empty, the souls she met in class too warm and too modern.

 

67

Transactional Relationship

He left the alley cat kibble, and she’d return to his porch with gifts of gratitude. Pigeon wings. Mice without heads. Sometimes a squirrel limb. When he poured some milk on it for her, she acknowledged the upgrade in cuisine, and brought him an entire rat. He set out a can of tuna in oil, and she deposited a freshly killed crow on his welcome mat. The day after he set out a filet of salmon, the cat waited on the porch until she was let in, for the greatest gift she could think to give was her living self.

 

68

He Would Have Loved It

Blame shared between good friends becomes a funny story, not a terrible sin. That was pretty much what happened at Ralph’s funeral. The guys had gone to the bar before the service. They’d each done a toast to honor their late, great, crazy friend. When they assumed their positions as pallbearers, with six shots of Jameson in each of their guts, they failed to ascend half of the slick cathedral steps. Ralph skidded down the stairs and onto Fourth Avenue. They all laughed so hard they cried rivers of hot tears as they clumsily retrieved him from the honking traffic.

 

69

Just Had To See Him

She never stopped loving him, not for a second. Not when he broke up with her abruptly. Not when he moved away without telling her where. Not when he met someone else. Not when he got engaged. Not when he had his first, or second child. Not when he and his incorrect wife got a restraining order. She tried to explain how pure her heart was, but it was hard to talk: her throat was bruised so badly. You see, his wife went to college on a softball scholarship, and she kept her bat by her bed, just in case.

 

70

One Degree of Separation

“As your new publicist, I need to know, what happened with your first marriage?” Well, that was decades ago. But honestly? He was emotionally abusive. Hated everything that brought me joy and made sure I knew it. “That’s a pretty negative take, and your story’s so uplifting. Can you give me a more positive spin?” Sure. He thought I was, wanted me to be, someone else. And that impossible caricature wasn’t someone I could respect. “So, we know he’s remarried. How would that sound to his new wife?” His new wife? Cheryl? “Yes, his beloved, Cheryl.” Cheryl, is this you?

 

71

Wish Granted

After they explained the company’s fiscal situation, they had him relinquish his keys and his computer, and he was swiftly escorted from the building. He had tried to keep his face steady, to not let them see the depth of his feelings about their decision. At the bus stop a block away, he had to sit down. He was shaking. Was overwhelmed. He’d been working there for seventeen years. He’d been doing good work for seventeen years. And he had despised, with every cell in in his body, that job for seventeen years. He wept with gratitude for his freedom.

 

72

Education

After having no teacher but his mother his whole life, college was a tsunami of disorientation. He had no direction, no major chosen. He was lost and depressed. But when the nude model took her place on the platform in the center of his drawing class, he immediately knew where to put his charcoal, how to capture her form. He did not look at the paper as his hand moved. Did not check his angles or his shadows. His work was proof of inspiration, of emerging skill. He immediately knew he must major in art, and that he was straight.

 

73

The Temporary Changeling

Her cub succumbed to weaknesses present in his body before she birthed him. She was wilder than she’d ever been after she told him goodbye somewhere in her now haunted woods. When the child crossed her path, her hunger fed her understandable directions on how to proceed. But her other, lingering instincts were far more insistent. She coaxed the child to her den, curled around it, kept it from freezing. His contented cooing convinced her she’d followed the right instructions. In the morning, the boy wandered back to his home, reeking of bear, before she remembered how ravenous she was.

 

74

Role Model

She spent ninety brutal minutes every morning on the treadmill. She spent hundreds every month on bitter supplements. She spent hour after hour in the tedious salon. There was not one minute she spent awake that she wasn’t hungry. She spent more energy than she had pretending that being beautiful was enough. She could not wait until she was eighteen, when her beauty would become her own, something to fritter away on her own terms. Soon, her parents, her brothers, her managers, could live off someone other than her. And she could walk away, not dressed in borrowed clothes, free.

 

75

A Dollar Can Be Anything

He stopped in the middle of the salad dressing aisle, overwhelmed. He could get any of them. He could get two. There were so many options. Organic. Balsamic. Italian. Ranch. Something called Greek Goddess that sounded too erotic to pour onto lettuce. He did not look at the prices. Did not look for what was on sale. He didn’t have to, not today. Today, that first paycheck was resting safely in the den of his checking account. He could breathe. He had three decimal spaces to relax in. ‘This is it,’ he understood. ‘This is how rich people always feel.’

 

76

Dark Plush

Her lazy, pink kindergartener played with wooden blocks on a rug knotted by tired, brown children younger than he was. She wore clothes assembled by hungry women who lived in homes smaller than her pantry. She sat on a long sofa built by stunted men who stood for sixteen hours a day. She knew, on some level, that her exhaustion was relative. She knew, on some level, that her problems were gifts. This knowing was not enough for her to feel lucky, for her not to feel bitter, when she met others with plusher rugs, bigger pantries, or longer sofas.

 

77

Our Mayor

She was born underweight, early, unwelcomed. The first time she met her father he asked her for money and called her by someone else’s name. The only compliments she got were backhanded, and most of them landed hard. She had more wisdom than permanent teeth. Once, after her roommate stole the last slice from her blank checkbook, she hitchhiked without her pocketknife because she felt she had nothing of value left to lose. She made it four hundred miles without a scratch, and that is how she came to make her life here, with us, where she is most welcome.

 

78

The Secret Bad Habit

The stern doctor did not smile as he spoke flatly to his mother. His mother listened wide-eyed, shivering with worry and fear. The child lay in the hospital bed, sweaty with guilt. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hopkins, but I’m afraid it’s fatal. After reviewing the x-rays, well, there’s no way for me to say this nicely, but it appears that your son has been swallowing his feelings.” His mother fainted. Crumpled on the floor. It was true. He had been doing that. And now, his insides were entirely corroded, and there was nothing more that could be done to save him.

 

79

Sacred Ground

When the congregation dwindled to zero, the stately church building in the middle of the dying town went up for sale. An nontheist bought it. She planned to turn it into a wedding venue for people who didn’t feel safe in other houses of worship. She thought that she’d make a modest living. She didn’t think there would be very much demand. So she scrubbed the pews and shined the glass, then advertised her kind intentions, mildly optimistic. Within hours, the church was booked every Saturday for the next thirty years, and the town reclaimed its place on the map.

 

80

The Last Night

“It feels like the end of the world is just getting started.” That was the kind of thing he would say, after a few too many puffs on the pipe they’d all passed around. But they knew he was right. They knew the pipe was cold. They knew the wildfire was not at all contained. They knew the bombs were still falling. They knew that even though they lived in a dormitory, their college was not ever going to hold classes again. And so they nodded, and kept dancing to the songs they’d downloaded before the cell towers went down.

 

81

Everyday Miracle

His shadow waved to him while his hands were in his pockets. He knew he’d forgotten. He shouldn’t forget. He stopped walking and held perfectly still. His shadow hopped like a frog. He was almost at work. If he went home now, he’d have to explain why he was late, again. But he had to go back. Ignoring the taunting of his shadow, he turned around: sweating, terrified, nervous, embarrassed, nauseated. Once home, he dashed to the medicine cabinet, fumbled with the precious orange bottle, and dryly gulped down the pill. On the way back to work, his shadow behaved.

 

82

A Weak Heart

His flight landed four hours ago. He already should be home. Maybe he decided to stay in Phoenix, to leave her and the kids for that other woman and her kids. Maybe he’d weighed the pros and cons of both families and found the Denver outpost to be grossly inferior. She knew it would happen eventually, but she hadn’t thought it would be today. He was cold, slumped in the driver’s seat in the long-term parking lot. The stress of it all, of all those kids, remembering which name to say in which bed, it had finally gotten to him.

 

83

Unwritten Rules

The owl prowled those woods for years. She knew every tree and stump, every bramble knot, every secret foxhole. She knew when the moon glowed, by the ivory satellite’s shifting shadows. She knew the about the tides and their crabs and snails exposed in the absence of briny water in the same way. She knew the edges of the wooded places and the rhythms of the concrete snakes that cut through them. She knew her territory, and where it was not, and who lurked at its edges. And then, one day, the chainsaws roared under floodlights, and she knew nothing.

 

84

If They Bite You, You Become One, Too

Inside the house, the light was golden. Outside the house, the moon was silver. Inside the house, sauces bubbled. Outside the house, hunger grew. Inside the house, tears flowed. Outside the house, drool congealed. Inside the house, the man paced the floors. Outside the house, his family clawed the siding. Inside the house, television whispered warnings of disease. Outside the house, disease spoke with quiet fever. Inside the house, the man reread his wife’s old love letters. Outside the house, his wife paced with furious, undead reflexes. Inside the house, the man reluctantly oiled his shotgun. Outside the house, hunger.

 

85

No Egos In Automation

If he wanted his full three days of severance pay, he had to train his replacement. He had no intention of doing a decent job. He limply pointed in the general location of the monitoring machines. Gestured toward the sterilization chamber where the implements were cleaned after use. He did not detail how to use any of the machinery or where it was kept or how it was maintained. “Good luck, to you, then. Being a surgeon’s not an easy job.” The robot did not blink, beep, or otherwise acknowledge his predecessor as the doctor huffily abandoned his operating room.

 

86

Juxtapositions

The museum didn’t charge admission and was always warm. She’d go there after school and wander the grand halls, soaking in the art and pretending to be a worldly student of aesthetics and history. Really, she just didn’t want to go home. Home was cold and people yelled there. Nobody yelled in the art museum (except the artists, and they did it silently, with paint and marble). She was there during the heist, when the alarms screamed and men in black masks ran through the main gallery with masterpieces tucked into their armpits. It finally felt, she thought, like home.

 

87

The Guardian

This was always a difficult conversation to have with the children, especially when they are paying the bills. You can’t legally mandate celibacy in a retirement home. With pregnancy off the table, residents tend to go wilder than you’d think, gorging themselves on the flesh buffet. The grown kids of my residents, well, they always cringe a little bit when they hear the news that their widowed parent is living like every week is spring break. So this time around, I just sent letters about the antibiotic-resistant chlamydia outbreak. Sorry, I can’t help it that old people find me attractive.

 

88

Got It From Mom

Her son raced across the playground after his soccer ball, tripped over his lavender taffeta dress and landed facedown in the wet mulch. The dress was an unfortunate sartorial decision she’d been forced to make when she was conscripted into being a bridesmaid for her cousin a decade before. ‘At least,’ she’d thought when her son had deliriously twirled in it, ‘someone likes this icky thing.’ Another kid laughed cruelly, barked like a seal. Her boy rose, adjusted his petticoat and dashed over to swiftly slug that kid’s still laughing jaw. He is who he is, she mused. He’s mine.

 

89

Self-Doubt

She fidgeted in the coffee shop, sweating in her most flattering sweater. She sat by the window, so she could see him approach. Hoped he wasn’t a serial killer or secretly married. Hoped he’d be pleasantly surprised by the reality of her. He was twenty, no, thirty, minutes late. She did not notice the man one table away, trying to concoct the courage he needed to say hello, to be simultaneously nonthreatening and charming. She checked her phone. Nothing. Her third no-show this week. The other man watched her flee the shop. He swallowed burning insecurity alongside his lukewarm espresso.

 

90

The Faun’s Granddaughter

The surgery that she so desperately needed was cruelly belittled: called both elective and cosmetic by the insurance company. It was not eligible for coverage. If she wanted to pay for it herself it would cost several impossible to acquire fortunes. “Mom! What now?” Her mother shrugged. Her mother had the same condition. “Look, you either whittle them down with a steak knife every morning. Or you wear them proudly, like I do.” She did not want to be like her mother, who never left the house except on Halloween, when her long, curling horns were admired instead of feared.

 

91

Clean Energy

He dove his pick-up truck onto the windmill fields and collected his inventory. He used a pitchfork to pick up each bird. His truck was always full, and he’d lash a tarp over his bounty for the drive back to the processing center. He’d usually collect between three and six hundred pounds of avian material on each trip. The meat and bones went to the dog food factory. The feathers went to fashion houses overseas. Those windmills knocked so many birds out of the sky that he could fill the back of his truck, four times a day, every day.

 

92

During the Amputation

Abraham Lincoln, Madonna, and Gandhi were seated at the same table at the back of the McDonald’s. She was surprised to see Gandhi demolishing a burger. Lincoln stood from his seat and offered it to her. Madonna was chewing gum loudly, sizing her up and finding her unfashionable. “I’m sorry,” she asked, “But, is this heaven?” Madonna stood up and stomped off, offended because she wasn’t dead yet. “So if I’m not in heaven, where am I?” Lincoln dipped a McNugget in sauce and said as he chewed scenery, “Oh, you’re still in surgery. They gave you the good drugs.”

 

93

Interactive Installation

Place an anonymous ad claiming to be a sentient, thrill seeking individual with a terminal illness who would like to be scared to death. Collect the offered methods of homicidal terror and present them to a medical doctor. Ask the doctor which method is most likely to result in death. Take that method to a skilled bartender. Ask the bartender to compose a cocktail inspired by the method. Calculate how many of those cocktails would end the life of a typical person, and arrange this information in poster form. Serve the cocktail and display the poster at your art opening.

 

94

Closure

She told him it was over. He cried. She didn’t feel the need to. He rented a studio apartment. She moved in with her girlfriends. He sat in darkness. She threw parties. He bought himself a mattress. She got a haircut. He drank cheap beer. She drank in the attention of everyone she’d never thought she could look at before. He learned to do laundry. She learned to trust herself. He joined a gym. She took an art class. They met up a few weeks later. He thought she looked younger. She thought he looked older. They never spoke again.

 

95

The Thing Unsaid

He sat in his office, stunned. His wife and child had been on the same boat. Nobody from any government would be able to drag it up to the surface for weeks. She’d texted him the itinerary, and so he knew they had boarded. They’d never been to his hometown before. Everyone was so excited. His flight was scheduled for the next day. She would have had two days with just his parents. His parents who would never see how obviously, how scandalously, the boy did not look like him. The one blessing in this pile of tragedy was that.

 

96

What the Boy She’d Never Marry Saw

The mast was cracked and crooked. The silent engine marinated in seawater. Not a single cloud kissed the horizon’s rim. Both the radio and GPS were dead. He felt like a flake of dust in a sunbeam, a tiny hostage to the whims of the weather. No birds flew this far from land. He suspected living things in the water, but didn’t see any when he peered into the waves. His half-sunk vessel would manage to float for another fifteen days before it would be spotted, and by then he’d set off in the rubbery raft, buoyed by delusional hope.

 

97

How Offense Is Taken

The other passengers were disgusted. There was a huge wolf covered in matted hair with dried blood on his jowls and paws, sitting there on the uptown bus, filing his claws with an emery board. The audacity of it! Nobody files their nails on the bus. It’s simply not done. There are rules. Some lines cannot be crossed. It was rush hour, and the bus was filling up quickly. Nobody wanted to sit beside the wolf, especially not while he was disgustingly and shamelessly grooming himself. Besides, there were chunks of the girl he’d just eaten all over that seat.

 

98

Picking Up Roots

For longer than four presidential administrations, it had been hers to water and feed. It lived in a clay pot half the size of a bathtub in her front bay window. When she got the notice that her landlord was going to demolish the building and she had to move, her main worry was the plant. When she told it she’d have to move it, but she wasn’t sure how, it smacked her with a branch and growled with sappy fury. She backed away, bleeding, and told it that it would be somebody else’s problem then, curse or no curse.

 

99

Cream of Mushroom

His first Christmas as an orphan, he didn’t put up a tree or a fight with his grief. He morosely wandered the sparkling streets until, hungry and tired, he entered a shabby diner that smelled like frustration. He ordered a bowl of the soup of the day without bothering to find out what that meant. It was boiling hot and violently salty, and any normal person would have sent it back without hesitation. But he didn’t. His mother over-salted everything. Her cooking had been rarely edible, often offensive. She had visited him, he knew, on Christmas, in her own way.

 

100

Fuel

It had been fourteen days since she’d had more than a few bites of anything. How could she eat when she had to re-budget, re-plan, and rebuild her entire life? She wondered if she’d made a horrid mistake, if staying with him would have really been any more traumatic than breaking up. She saw him on the street. He looked handsome. She was dizzy, pale, weak. He did not stop while he said it, growled it in passing, “Well, look at you. You’re finally getting hot.” And she knew she’d made the right decision, and that she needed some dinner.

 

101

Invisibility

She was plump, gray, short, and looked harmless. She wore sloppy clothes in muted colors that were the antonym of style. No jewelry. No lipstick. No perfume. Her appearance was crucial to her work. She was paid well, and frequently. Nobody looked over their shoulder when she followed them. She hid the tools of her trade in a bag of cleaning supplies. She could get into anywhere, as long as she lugged a vacuum cleaner that bulky tote of rags. Her orthopedic shoes were silent as a ninja’s slippers, and her fist-sized gun was just as considerate of the neighbors.

 

102

Denial of Worry

It was seven o’clock in the morning. The mother and the father both pretended to each other to be asleep. Their infant was five months old. The baby monitor was silent. “What if he’s dead?” They both thought, “What good would getting up do then?” The infant had never slept an entire night. They’d never slept so late with him in their home. The father snuggled close to the mother. The mother accepted his warmth and nuzzled back. They felt loved, safe, in a world of just their own. The baby cooed through the monitor, and all three were calm.

 

103

Overlooked

Her father took his sons hunting and left her at home to do their breakfast dishes. She watched her mother fold laundry as the truck drove off. She re-read the documents detailing her extraordinary intelligence after she fished them out of the trash. Her mother shrugged when confronted with the rumpled papers, told her not to get so worked up. She noted the address of the college and plotted the route. She loaded her backpack with all her books. She left that house without her key. On the first day of hunting season, she shot herself into a better future.

 

104

Repressed Splurging

His allowance was calculated down to the dime, just enough to buy food for the children and to cover the utilities. Their home was sparse, tidy, unpretentious. He got it in the divorce, along with half of all she’d squirreled away. The day she left, he sat in concentrated silence, clicking his ancient laptop for hours. He spent the equivalent of six months’ allowance. Two days later, they arrived. Italian leather dyed a cinnamon red and buffed cabochon smooth. Hand tooled by mythically talented artisans. He peacocked around his house in the oxfords. A dozen more boxes were en route.

 

105

Sight-Seeing

The tourists were warned not to anger the elves. Littering, peeing on moss-covered rocks, shouting too loudly during the night: all could invoke the fury of the invisible inhabitants nearby. The southern tourists were there to see the Northern Lights. The tourists had been warned, but had not listened: typical of blokes on holiday. When the guides lured the disrespectful visitors out of their cabins into the cold night, and urged them to crane their necks skyward, the elves descended upon the invaders, furious. Elves have sharp fangs and hungers. This fact is never shared with anyone lacking elfin blood.

 

106

Street Smart

The cops had apprehended both of them, this he knew. They were asking him questions they didn’t know the answers to. Good. That gave him a key variable. Whoever snitched first would give them the missing numbers and would receive a shorter sentence. He said nothing. He knew that no matter how gruesome the punishment they threatened, it would be worse once he got out if he filled them in. His partner did the same computation. Said nothing. They were both free by dinnertime. If you’re going to make any kind of living, you need to pass high school algebra.

 

107

Nature, Nurture, Economics

He was three times the size of any of his healthy littermates. He was pure white, no spots of black or bits of pink. His eyes were red. His tail was long and straight instead of curly. He was weird. “This one is messed up. Keep this thing out of the food chain,” said the superstitious farmer. “This one is huge. Keep him for breeding more big ones,” said the greedy one, who mocked the idea of curses and jinxes. The greedy opinion won out. The monstrous pig was put to stud. His offspring now govern us, and not wisely.

 

108

What Doesn’t Kill

Most people don’t know this, but there are two kinds of tooth fairy. For most kids, the kind tooth fairies only take teeth once they’ve fallen out. But for those dealt a cruel hand, the bad kind of tooth fairies possess the bodies of the wicked, and knock teeth down throats. There’s no reward for teeth that get swallowed. The only way to survive a visit by the second kind of tooth fairy is to persevere, to pass those teeth silently. The kids who survive that kind of visit are the strong ones, the powerful ones. And they know it.

 

109

Broken Pledge

She knew not to choose dare. She’d have to do something gross, demeaning, haunting, like strip to her underwear and let the sisters draw lines in permanent marker where she needed liposuction. The other girls had warned her that pledge week was only a week, and that whatever happened would be over soon enough. She felt like a wounded rabbit dropped alive into an eagle’s nest. Her beer was warm and flat in her hand. “Tell us who you hate. Like, really, hate.” She did not want to spend any more time getting picked apart. “You. I hate you all.”

 

110

The Good Worker

If she used it, she would die. If she didn’t, she feared her sisters would. She carried her weapon everywhere, frightening small children and large men in equal numbers. Part poison, part dagger, she never went anywhere without it, just in case. The day she had to use it, she didn’t think twice about it. The child swung at her, so she impaled him. Her sisters smelled her aggression and flew to her aid, swarming the boy in a cloud of violence. Twelve died in the melee. In the royal chambers, her queen laid a dozen eggs to replace them.

 

111

Going Through the Motions

“And what is it that you’d like to confess?” She fidgeted, unsure if admitting to it would do any good at all. He couldn’t tell anyone what she said. And she needed the old man to tell for her. “Well, to be honest, I don’t believe any of this. I lie when I pray. I pretend to have faith. I feel like a fraud when I recite the creed.” She heard a phlegmy sigh and braced for an exasperated, meandering lecture. “I feel the same way, but if I quit, I’d have no way to provide for myself, you understand?”

 

112

Misinformation

He never forgave his daughter for dating the boy who got deported. Just the thought of the two of them together would make him go red and greasy with rage. He knew about those people: the diseases and crime they carried under their skin. The guys on the radio had warned him. He didn’t know that his daughter practiced her Spanish diligently or that she’d applied for a passport the day she turned eighteen and had it mailed to a secret post office box. She left for good once she had it. Even then, he didn’t regret calling the authorities.

 

113

Future Imperfect

He only had two hands. He could only carry two tablets. The third he left on the hill, promised himself he’d go back for it later. Besides, those last five rules seemed much less important. Thou shall not exploit each other. Honor my creation as you do yourself. Thou shall not thwart another’s love. Thou shall not shun. Thou shall learn from what I have shown you. Whatever. He figured everybody would be fine with just the first ten. That hill was pretty steep. Did he really have to hike up it again? Naw. People could figure the rest out.

 

114

Gone Five Years

His family kept ignoring him. He’d look right at them and they wouldn’t even make eye contact. They wouldn’t answer his questions. Didn’t even set a place for him at the dinner table. He was furious at being disregarded, and at the same time, felt guilty for a crime he couldn’t remember committing. What had caused this schism? He stewed and paced and finally, overcome with frustration, threw the mantel clock across the room. That got their attention. His wife gasped, and his son gulped hard before asking her, “Do you think that’s him?” His wife nodded, and crossed herself.

 

115

Only Child

He’d been in his cell for three world wars, seventeen droughts, twenty election cycles, and one particularly nasty pandemic. He was supposed to be in there forever, but when the electricity shut off all the doors came unlocked. He and two remaining others went and looked around. Everything smelled like a burned out campfire. The each wandered off in a different direction, and never spoke again. He headed north, met me, and that’s why you’re here. My prison was further south, and I was the only woman left there. Those other two are your only family, far as I know.

 

116

Something Like a Truce

One neighbor had a collection of classic muscle cars, each overhauled at great expense and with great care. The other had a pond, and an affinity for geese. The roaring engines scared off birds and the birds’ excrement ate through paint jobs. The two men undertook a cold war. Their wives were the best of friends, and each hatched a peace plan without the other knowing. The duck lover’s wife, claiming basement flooding, drained the pond. The mechanic’s wife, claiming poverty, sold his fleet. The men eventually bonded over their sneaky, controlling wives, who waited patiently for them to die.

 

117

Mammalian Obstacles

Her mother told her not to worry, that all girls had them. Her mother told her that one day, she’d make some man the happiest husband alive. She dressed her daughter in thick wool sweaters to hide them, to ease her shame. But they were impossible to hide when changing for gym class. The other girls gawked. Called her a freak. Her mother said they were just jealous. Her daughter said she felt like a cow. Her mother held her as she cried. “Look, if they bother you that much, when you’re older, you can get the bottom pairs removed.”

 

118

San Mateo Dreams

His buddy drove an ancient station wagon with enough room in the back for a grown man to stretch out. So when his mother evicted him, jobless at twenty-six, he knew he’d have a place to crash where nobody would be bothered by his snoring. He moved into the rusty wagon, paid his rent in gas money, and used whatever WiFi that he could snag during the day. He fogged up the windows and showered at a gym that had soap dispensers. When his company went public, he bought his buddy a new car, and got himself a proper van.

 

119

Underemployment

She wasn’t wholesome enough to remain an angel. He wasn’t devious enough to function in hell. They met on a subway ride, her wings hidden under a puffer coat and his tail tucked into a messenger bag. They bonded over exile, and how much they hated working as baristas. They both got their letters on the same day, the notices to return home to battle the other’s empire. They arrived at the main gate together, and offered to broker a peace. Their offer rebuffed, they returned to their bars, pulling shots of espresso and watching the universe implode, as usual.

 

120

Hands of the Beholder

She could have graced every catwalk in Milan, if only designers dared to incorporate her long white cane with the red tip into their accessories collections. She never knew that she spun every head on the street as she traveled, or that her accidentally perfect posture and seemingly poreless skin were things others would sell their souls for. But she did know who she loved, and when she stroked his cheeks, she realized that the gourd in the middle of her mother’s Thanksgiving centerpiece, the one with all the bumps and dry ridges, resembled the most gorgeous face on earth.

 

121

The Part-Time Job

As a gentle, heavy old man with a white beard, the job paid him to be himself, just in a costume. He assumed his position on a throne between the Cinnabon and Sears. His daughter was glad he had a job, was spending time around people. But when he came home after that first shift, she found him sitting on the kitchen floor, head in his hands. “Dad? What’s the matter?” He blew his nose on his sleeve and gasped, “The only kid who asked for world peace had cancer, and all the rest of them didn’t believe in me.”

 

122

True Love

Claire was trustworthy and reliable, and not sexy at all, though a decade younger than he was. She could carry heavy things, was efficient and low-maintenance; Claire never complained. He could tell her anything, and often did, especially when they were alone, just the two of them. She went with him when he moved across the country, and she listened when he cried to her about the girls he craved. Claire was from Germany. She only broke down once, after they’d been together for years and he realized he’d horribly neglected her. He put another fifty thousand miles on her.

 

123

Bookends

She was elated, thrilled, relieved, ready to begin. She was buoyant, untethered, delirious with joy. She was dizzy, hungry, and calmly expectant. She cried. She was thrilled and excited about all of her tomorrows. She felt formidably beautiful and fragile at once. She was ready, willing, and able to accept all the mysteries her future held. She wanted to dance and eat cake and hug her friends. She knew that any music she heard would make her swoon with warm nostalgia for the moment. The day she got married and the day she got divorced, she felt exactly the same.

 

124

Insider Knowledge

He looked normal enough when he Skyped with clients. He always wore a shirt and tie, though, of course, pants weren’t needed. He knew tons of valuable information about racehorses and how to train them, what to feed them what they required to win. He could translate the primal needs of stallions like nobody in the business. They called him the blue ribbon whisperer. But damn it if he didn’t hate that he could never show up to racetracks to run his hand across the rippling shoulders of a champion. Still, as a centaur in Kentucky, he was doing okay.

 

125

Creature of Habit

She leaned into the mirror and pinched the skin on her nose. She’d expected a little plop of pus. Hoped for that, honestly. But what came out was far more horrific. “Hello! How are you? Hi! I’m the Acne Sprite. I’m here to superficially annoy you!” It was an elf the size of a pencil tip, visible only via her mother’s magnifying mirror. “I’m good luck if you listen to my advice! Never squeeze me or my cousins out of your body again!” She gave it an apprehensive glance, then smeared the greasy, vile thing to death with her thumb.

 

126

Unclean

The mother screamed louder than her infant, “You poured acid on my baby!” The priest fumbled with the pitcher, poured it over his own hands, which did not bubble and bleed like the infant’s forehead. “No, no. It’s only water. Only water.” When he tried to dab the weeping blisters with his vestments, the baby’s scream rattled stained glass. The mother fled down the aisle, tightly clutching her screeching, wounded child. The baptism violently aborted, the priest sputtered apologies and condolences to his silently horrified congregation. The child’s face was forever disfigured. She never again entered a house of worship.

 

127

Dropped Call

“Oh, please don’t. No. Well, just because. No. I don’t like him. There’s something strange in his eyes. Something not right. No. You cannot go to his house. No. You listen to me. Listen to my bad feeling. Listen! No. I can’t explain it any better than that. Trust me. I’m your mother. I know these things. I just do. My gut is never wrong. Not about things like this. I know danger when I shake its hand. And he was. Is. No. Come home. Just come straight home. Okay? Bobby? Bobby, you there?” He did not come straight home.

 

128

Keeping Busy

Every autumn, he took on the role of deciduous Sisyphus, battling the onslaught of continuously dying leaves with his springy rake, never getting his lawn completely clear of debris. He did it religiously, a strenuous Sunday morning effort that earned him the approval of his observant neighbors and not much else. After he’d thickened the calluses on his thumbs, he’d head inside to watch football. His work done for the week, he’d become one with his recliner until the next Sabbath, when he’d again take to the battlefield and score a temporary win for his team. He hated being retired.

 

129

When She Knew He Wasn’t It

She kept her eyes shut tight. He’d told her he had a surprise for her. This was it. He was going to ask. She couldn’t wait to see the ring, to see him holding it, to hear him say, “Okay, open your eyes!” She did. She gasped. It was stunning. Absolutely incredible. When had he done this? Her face fell. “You don’t like it?” She wasn’t sure how to articulate her horror. “I wanted to show you that what we have is a forever thing,” he explained. A forever thing: her name, misspelled in crooked gothic letters across his back.

 

130

Sick with Exposure

They’d sold the house outside Toledo and moved to Arizona that summer, and this would be his first Christmas visiting their new place. He was looking forward to seeing his easy-going, supportive hippie parents, to telling them about his new job and fledgling relationship. He’d planned to stay a week, but left after only an hour. He just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t wander around raw with all those leathery old people, couldn’t watch his mother cannonball into the pool like that. They should have told him that’s where they lived now, what the rules were. They should have warned him.

 

131

Caring for Little Creatures

She took the twins to the pet store to pass the time. They could spend two hours tapping the glass of the guinea pig enclosures and cooing at unhealthy goldfish. They would approach any dogs people brought with them to the store, happily taking licks to the face and being polite so they could pet them. She needed to keep them occupied for another hour before they went home. The alibi had to be airtight. She knew the cameras would capture them exploring, would vouch for their whereabouts while her brother took care of her husband once and for all.

 

132

The One Who Got Away

He turned off the lights and the television and hid behind the sofa. This was getting ridiculous. She was ridiculous. They’d gone on one, chemistry-free date. He’d been polite about it, as kind as he could have been. She kept texting. Then calling. And now she was banging on the door. How the hell did she know where he lived? His roommate whispered in the dark, “Maybe if I go talk to her? Tell her she’s got the wrong idea?” He nodded. His roommate opened the door, stepped outside to talk to her, and didn’t come back for three years.

 

133

Strategy

His mother and father were also his half-sister and uncle. His throne supported his serpentine spine. His jaw hung slack, an overflowing gutter beneath his constantly dripping nose. His diaper was obviously full. I said I would marry him under two conditions. One: that all of his royal decrees be spoken through me, and me alone. And two: that I choose his heirs if children could not be produced. His mother (my aunt) consented with relief. He grunted, as though he understood. My love, a commoner with a profile worthy of a gold coin, smirked as I signed the parchments.

 

134

Nausea Either Way

My father, the conservative republican, and my mother, the revolutionary communist, employed argument as foreplay. The angrier their words, the more love I saw in their eyes. Knowing that my parents both enjoyed each other that way was an awkward comfort. One point agreed on: they both loved steak, grilling and marinating and watching the juices run from medium rare cuts of fresh beef. When I grew up and became a vegetarian, hearing them forcefully make long, verbal lists of rational reasons I should just have a burger felt grossly incestuous; I chewed my meals of beef whenever I visited.

 

135

Fertile Territory

Aunty admitted why she didn’t eat peaches and her story soured the fruit forever for me. On her deathbed, my aunt’s cousin told her that long before, she’d run to the outhouse, wrecked with pain. There, in the stinking dark, she delivered a blue, breathless child she had not known was coming. Stunned and shocked, the cousin threw the thing down the outhouse pit, and never told until her dying moments. But after the outhouse filled, a grand peach tree grew on the spot. My aunt ate hundreds of those haunted peaches before she knew of their secret, doomed fuel.

 

136

A Familiar

On the coldest day in a decade in the middle of North Dakota, he found the strongest kitten the world had ever built. It was smaller than a softball, frozen to the middle of a highway, crying into the cruel wind that had frozen everything else for dozens of miles. He warmed it until he could lift it up. Fed it until it opened its eyes. And loved it with a fierceness he had only read about in fairy tales. The sturdy cat repaid him with unstoppable velvet loyalty. It stayed by his side, forever, because true love is immortal.

 

137

Who Old Men Fear

She had a maser’s degree and a condo: both paid off. She had a wardrobe of very tiny, dry-clean only silk dresses that she wore in careful rotation. She had an easy job that paid her well. She had a frequently used gym membership. She had a grotesquely bloated investment portfolio she’d be happy to cash out for the right person. She had perfect eyebrows and teeth. She had a penthouse timeshare in Maui. She had only just turned twenty-six. She had seven dating apps on her phone. She hadn’t slept with anyone in almost a year. She had standards.

 

138

A Worthy Foe

The alligator sashayed across her yard. She hated it. Hated it so much. That monster had taken her precious Fluffy from her, and for that, it would pay dearly. She watched through her lace curtains. She’d thawed the turkey and left the floppy carcass as bait. The monster wanted the bald bird, was falling for her tricks. The bear trap jumped as it snapped shut. Victory! Then, somehow, the beast sauntered away, wearing the trap like an iron necklace. “Not today, Satan!” she hissed, as she grabbed her shotgun and gunned her wheelchair out the door to do more battle.

 

139

They Kept it Neon Teal

She was going to come home from that trip, jetlagged and bitching about her idiot colleagues, and then she’d see what he’d done while she was gone, and she would melt, and feel appreciated and understood. She’d wanted to paint that room. He did that and put new everything in it: furniture, rugs, lamps, even curtains. He’d picked it all out himself, aided by the notes she’d made in her design workbook. When she walked in, she began to laugh. Not bemused giggles, but bent-over gasping, red-faced cackling. “Babe,” she said, “I love you, but you are colorblind as Hell.”

 

140

The Last Epidemic

The first symptom is a warm sensation under the skin on the back of the neck, near the hairline. The disease progresses quickly from onset, the wave of warmth spreading throughout the body within about a day. By the time the extremities are infused with the cozy hum of the disease, it can be accurately predicted that the patient will succumb within the hour. If you feel something warm settling into the flesh of the back of your neck, quarantine yourself, immediately. Fear not: it will be painless. In fact, you may feel more comfortable than you ever have before.

 

141

Emergency Contact

Her phone rang as soon as the food arrived. She excused herself and left the table. Her boyfriend’s mother raised her eyebrows in displeasure. “Her work’s important,” he countered. He didn’t want to explain exactly what his girlfriend did, why she didn’t get paid, or why she’d never, ever stop doing it. Her signs covered the railings of Overlook Bridge and read: Everyone who jumped and lived regrets leaping above her phone number. She got back before her meal was cold. “I hope that was necessary,” the mother commented coldly. “Yes,” the girl said, “He decided to stay with us.”

 

142

Everyone’s Lovable

Asked to describe himself, he answered: I am a roadside cigarette butt. I am the last chapter of an unfinishable book. I am the car accident too gruesome to slow down for. I am the abandoned campfire that sparked the fire of a town nobody can call home anymore. I am the scar too deep to see that never stops burning. I am so sorry. He was not expecting anyone to respond to his attempt at an online profile. But respond they did. Hundreds of women wanted that rehabilitation project, that tricky puzzle, that boy as broken as they were.

 

143

The Dalmatian

Her many black spots had long since faded to gray, the color of windowsill dust. Her eyes that once sparkled obsidian were now a milky blue. He cradled her head in the cook of his arm, inhaled the sacred warmth of her. She’d been with him his eight hardest years, and she was the only reason he’d persisted through any of them. She was so wise, loyal, so much better than humanly good. The technician brought the syringe to her paw, and he nodded. “Go to your best dream, your happiest dream, and you stay there,” he whispered. She did.

 

144

Thrown For a Loop

He knew that mobile: the soft, dangling whales. His mother had mailed it to him before his first child was born. It dangled above his grandchild’s crib, too. He groaned. Again. He was doing it again. This was the sixth time. He’d get all the way to the end, take a snooze in a sunny room under sterile hospital blankets, and then wake up here, under the felted whales. He tried to do things differently every time, and every time, everything turned out exactly as it had before. He already knew what would happen next, for the next eighty-seven years.

 

145

Pre-Relapse

The first time he didn’t have a social worker watching them, he took her to the park. He was a good dad, as much as anybody would let him be. As he pushed her on the swing, her giggles gave him the deep joy no gallon of bourbon ever could. She begged to fly higher, and he obliged. It was one of those bright fall days that made men quit good jobs to write bad poetry. His pride was wholesome and exhilarating. The rope snapped. She flew across the playground and landed with a nauseating thunk against the concrete wall.

 

146

Neverland

The little ship had landed on the coldest, shortest day of the coldest, longest winter. She and her friends had been praying for rescue, though they’d been certain that death would arrive before help. The ship was captained by a sturdy, redheaded girl of no more than twelve, and crewed by a filthy posse of feisty children who wore pants and the title of orphan with pride. The captain offered adventure, buckets of grog, dry quarters, and all the salty fish they could eat. Without hesitation, they boarded her ship and sailed south, leaving Roanoke to wither under the snow.

 

147

Allies

Before he even finished bellowing her ignored idea in his deep voice, it was put into action. After the meeting he took her aside and conspiratorially offered to repeat the process with any plans she wanted to carry forward. For years, the cagey opportunists worked in tandem, her creativity and his gravitas blending seamlessly into mutually beneficial endeavors. They ascended the slick ladder of corporate responsibility, covering and vouching for each other as they climbed. On the day they both retired, they stood on her expansive veranda, finally asking each other, with both regret and hope, why they’d never kissed.

 

148

Ungriftable

She felt like a washing machine full of bricks, sitting there, listening to him lie to her. The numbers he recited were mathematic fictions. The true story of the company was nothing like the fairy tale he was telling. But she knew not to interrupt. Not yet. Not until he said everything, said it clearly. She nodded at every insulting fabrication and let him furiously vomit out his own doom. She sat behind her laptop and focused on the red light at the top of the screen. She was broadcasting live, and the authorities in the van outside were listening.

 

149

Hospice

His mother never left the house without hose on her legs and powder on her nose. Never went anywhere for lunch that didn’t serve martinis. Never forgot a slight or a birthday. Never trusted people she couldn’t destroy. She demanded the respect due a monarch who launched armadas on a whim, though her empire had never stretched beyond an acre of rocky sod. He should have known she’d hate the new place. Should have guessed she’d pack a leather suitcase with velvet turbans then call a cab in the night and never come back for that last round of chemo.

 

150

The Day Before Easter

His friends had to get him out of there. They knew he wasn’t dead, had seen him gasp as his body was loaded onto that cart. He didn’t belong in a cold, dark tomb. He belonged under attentive medical care, belonged at home, with his wife. Once they moved the boulder, they found him still alive, but barely. He’d been in there three days already. They gave him water, wrapped him up, and gently carried him back to camp. “You have no idea how excited everybody’s going to be when they see you,” they told him. He smiled knowingly, angelically.

 

151

Sent Uninsured

His oysters produced pearls the size of walnuts that year. Each one glowed like a fallen moon. The farmer wrapped them in silk scraps, packed them in a box lined with tufts of clean cotton, and hid it under his bed. He slept above his cache of fortunes, dreaming about the comforts of freedom they would soon afford him. The next day would mail them to his daughter, who lived in the devious, angry city. She’d know how to find buyers. She could retire young, too. The tracking number failed to follow his hopes. His daughter never believed him again.

 

152

Goodnight, Panda

The entire world, it seemed, was watching the live footage of the sick animal, an icon declining inside her climate-controlled enclosure. The world had noticed how thin she’d become, how very fragile she looked. The world knew that sacred samples of her blood had been taken, in the hopes that maybe, someday, if the technology ever caught up to their desperate optimism, some geniuses could create another version of her. The world knew she was the end of the dynasty, and when the video went to black, the world cried for her, and cursed each other for letting it happen.

 

153

The U Word

She felt terrible for thinking it but the thought would not leave her head. She was the child’s mother. She shouldn’t think it. There should be maternal chemicals in her brain that stop those kinds of thoughts from forming. She should be blind to the idea. But she knew. One look and it was obvious, and no hormones could erase the cruelty of reality. She whispered the four-letter word to her husband, expecting to be told she was completely wrong, no, the baby is adorable. But instead, he replied, “I know she is. But hopefully, someday, she won’t be anymore.”

 

154

Subletting

He was mouse-quiet. Never left a dish in the sink. Never brought home noisy friends or lovers. Never used all the hot water. Never stole anything of hers from the fridge. He never even lounged in the living room or stunk up the kitchen. She rarely even saw him. She thought she’d won the roommate lottery. But one evening, she walked in on him hunched over a boy on the couch, suckling his neck. The boy’s body was gray. Her roommate’s eyes were bright. “Don’t worry,” he told her as he smiled and retracted his fangs, “I’ll clean this up.”

 

155

Gatekeeping

His high school grades were anemic due to the overlapping of laziness and incuriosity. He had no known motivations. He’d already been arrested three times. His parents figured he’d spend a little time at some community college before dropping out, as a best-case scenario. But thanks to an overworked secretary’s data entry error, he was admitted to an elite university. As he read the acceptance letter, he blossomed. If that school believed in him, well, it wouldn’t kill him to do the same. He graduated at the apex of his class with all available honors. Now he runs the world.

 

156

The Rally

The cake boasted seven tiers. The buttercream frosting alone weighed nine pounds. A band played jazzy interpretations of love songs while tuxedoed waiters offered glasses of champagne on sterling trays. There were dozens of toasts. Fireworks boomed for nearly an hour. She sparkled in the dress she’d waited so long to wear. Her mother asked her, as the party began to dissipate, if she was okay. With tears in her eyes, she said yes, that it was more beautiful than she could have imagined, that the day had been lovely and joyous, even though he hadn’t gone through with it.

 

157

The End of Two Powerful Careers

The assassin had never been hired to miss before. Anyone can miss. He was rather insulted. Fuming at the request, he paced his penthouse for a while before deciding what to do with the offer. He’d never revealed his clients, but anyone lacking that much respect for his ancient craft deserved to be outed. He sent this message to as many media outlets as he could: The Prime Minister attempted to stage an attempted assassination on himself today, in order to drum up sympathy and enthusiasm for his upcoming campaign. Nobody ran the story until the bullet punctured the politician.

 

158

An Asset, After All

She’d been so deeply ashamed of it as a child. It couldn’t be amputated, because it was full of nerves and she’d be paralyzed from the waist down without it. So she wore oddly fitting clothes to cover it and never swam. Only as an adult did she realize how valuable it could be. Her clients just wanted to touch it, kiss it, and watch her wag it for them. Her hourly rate to let them do so was more than the price of a luxury car: because while her appendage was rare, the fetish involving it was decidedly not.

 

159

Missing Person

He had no idea how he’d gotten there. Had no idea what he was doing in that airport. He’d boarded the flight, passed out, and awoken with no idea who he was or why he was. So he wandered out of the bustling hub without his suitcase, eventually consulting his wallet for clues. The name on the driver’s license was unfamiliar and the address on it was a place he didn’t think he’d ever visited. Also in the wallet was a scrap of paper that read: Dad, if you forget everything above a phone number that had been blacked out.

 

160

Goals

His parents used the public pool as a babysitting service, got him a summer-long pass. He scavenged the bottom of it for coins fathers had forgotten to take out of their swimsuit pockets. Every day, he’d amass a fortune of between twenty and ninety cents, which he would squirrel away in a plastic bag hidden in the back of his underwear drawer. At the end of summer he emptied the bag and counted out seventy-three dollars and forty-one cents. More than enough for new shoes, the kind that kids wouldn’t make fun of, the kind with a recognizable brand name.

 

161

Rotten Roots

“Well, according to the x-rays, you have a new set of teeth coming in. This is not completely unheard-of, having three sets of teeth. I know how alarming it is, to have your teeth get loose and come out when you’re in your thirties! But don’t worry, honey. You’re not sick. You’re just very rare.” She cried the whole way home. Her skull ached eyes to neck. She only knew one other person who’d gone through this process. An old friend of her mom’s. He didn’t visit anymore. Her dad had knocked out his teeth, and they’d grown right back.

 

 

162

Bonded Pair

Black but for the cross-hatching of thick, pink scars that covered more than half of him, he did not move when she paused at his pen. He was silent, curled in a ball, while the rest of the dogs in the shelter leapt and barked and begged. “He won every fight they gave him. This little guy’s a killer. Naw, you’ll want somebody younger, too.” She thought about her own ropey scars, how long she’d worn them, about all the fights she’d managed to win but shouldn’t have. Separated by a cloth of chain lace, the soul mates locked eyes.

 

163

So Don’t Litter

Another boy at school had told him that if he littered, the elves would get him, would bite him while he slept. He thought elves were gentle toymakers who lived in the tundra, not vengeful creatures who punished children’s misdemeanors. And while he doubted the other boy’s story, he did not doubt it entirely. He’d never seen an elf, and wanted to. So on his way home from school he dropped a snotty tissue from his pocket: bait for a supernatural visit. The next morning his pillow was soaked with blood and the top of his right ear was missing.

 

164

Her Thoughts and Prayers

Gunshots sounded like that? Huh. She never would have thought. She’d imagined they’d sound like thunder: far off, heavy but not oppressive, low and dense. But this was not like that at all. There was nothing dull or distant. It was bright and fierce and blinding. Or maybe that was the pain. It was all one weird sensation. She couldn’t separate the sound from the sight from the smell from the sting. She tried to parse what has just happened, to separate the elements of the moment, but couldn’t, as she bled furiously under her desk, silently pleading for help.

 

165

Retrieval

The private investigator knew most secrets ended up in the trash, so that’s where he started his research. He often found prescription bottles, receipts, itemized bills and other (if not criminal then at least incriminating), evidence. After twenty years on the job, his investigations felt customary rather than titillating, and he rarely got emotional involved with his work. But a bundle of unsent love letters shattered his professionalism. He swooned for the words of a grossly tender soul, harboring a longing that cruelly eroded every facet of her life. When asked how he met his wife, he tells an untruth.

 

166

Homeopathic Steroids

His mother boiled the snail, which was the size of a man’s fist, in salty broth. She scooped out the shell once the snail had fled it, and then turned down the heat. He hated the rubbery texture of that meat and the snotty skin that formed on the top of the soup as it simmered. He loved that his mother took so much effort to prepare him such a foul meal, loved that she fretted over his wellbeing, that she cared so much about his future. He pretended to enjoy it. He knew better than to mock witch’s medicine.

 

167

A Chosen End

There’s perverse glee in loathing someone. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins because it can, in fact, kill you. Combine those ideas to understand that he died doing what he loved. He met his nemesis at work, where they were both salaried architectural engineers. That woman’s work was beyond all but the pettiest critique, and so petty critique became his professional hobby. That hobby metastasized into a skill that earned him a promotion to engineering director, and once in that seat of power, he fired his rival. While she flourished elsewhere, the engineering director drank himself to death.

 

168

Sanctuary

Her grandfather had built the house himself from lumber he extracted from trees nearby. Constructed of square beams of cedar atop a foundation of hand-mixed concrete, the home was four times as sturdy as modern codes mandated. He lived alone there for thirty years after his divorce. When she went to visit him for the last time, he showed her his tool shed, where he kept the chainsaw and stump grinder, and let her peak into his wardrobe, where he kept his wigs and lingerie. The house, he told her, was built to be the safest place in the world.

 

169

Unwanted Virtue

An albino guinea pig lived in Mrs. Timmon’s third grade classroom, a nervous and unholdable pet. She bit all of the small hands but two. Mrs. Timmon’s offered her to the boy with the unbroken skin, and the boy gladly carted the rodent and her fetid accouterments home. Having no other noticeable qualities, the boy adopted gentleness as his defining feature. That was who he decided he was: unbitable, trustworthy. When he was drafted, he tried not to go. “Nothing has ever harmed me. I must return those favors.” His excuse rejected, he was remade into the opposite of himself.

 

170

Bands Without Songs

She worked as a cleaner, tidying up after the lonely dead who left no heirs or instructions. Through her always arduous, often odiferous work, she often found bands of gold and silver lying dusty and forgotten in the abandoned apartments. She collected them in a vase under the sink that only she used. By the end of her career, she had the makings of an opera-length chain. “Link these in a necklace,” she commanded a jeweler. She knew that someday, she’d be found by someone like herself, and she wanted to be admired, before her jewelry was stolen from her.

 

171

Disillusionism

He hated painting. Didn’t believe that pigment on canvas had any redeeming value beyond the checks cashed after auctions. He hadn’t always been so sour on his vocation. He’d loved painting once, when it reciprocated him with joyful poverty. So after he shipped to his dealer a pile of canvases composed in a pique of artistic frustration, he was doubly disgusted to find that they’d been received with utter amazement and gratitude, that they’d cemented his name in the canon of oils. He cashed the resulting enormous check, threw all his brushes into the garbage disposal, and switched it on.

 

172

The Bargain Down the Block

The house shouldn’t have been so cheap. It was solid, handsome, and mounted inside a zip code that translated to smug wealth. But the owners could not stay there. Their boy had gone to sleep and failed to wake, and the aura of his room infused their entire house with a choking darkness. So they decided to take a financial loss to lessen their emotional one. The next owners had no awareness of the tragedy they lived with until their young son developed a friendship with an invisible boy named like the one who’d slept in his room, years before.

 

173

Rationalization

He had three hours. That’s how long the kid’s party was. He could get pretty far in that time. His wife: his lovely, oblivious wife, wouldn’t worry for four hours, at least. As long as nobody found him, she could collect the insurance, and he could restart. Everyone would win, at least break even. He wouldn’t be a ghost; he’d be a mystery. An opened ended question. Space for hope. Room for the best excuses to put down roots and bloom. He put out his thumb, hopped into a willing car, and left the smallest scar he thought he could.

 

174

Perpetual Denial

He knew he wasn’t crazy but he lived in the asylum anyway. The food was pretty good and he didn’t have to do anything but wander the grounds and sometimes talk about his childhood with fledgling doctors doing their own tedious residencies. He figured that eventually the professionals would catch on to the fact that he was fine and they’d exile him from his long vacation, send him back to work at the law firm again. Until then he would enjoy strolling along the paths around property and wonder what homesickness felt like, wonder why he had so many scars.

 

175

Shadows and Light

She closely watched the role models she’d been given. Her father: who hated his work and the small life it afforded him. Her mother: who never worked and wept about oppotunities she lacked. Her teachers: angry people who delighted in punishing anything resembling fun. And the other kids: who belittled and bullied via the arbitrary and ever-changing laws of the playground. She compiled from their examples a list of the miserable things she never wanted to be. She acted in opposition to their behaviors, lived as the inversion all that she observed. And so she thrived, and became happy.

 

176

Cloying

His cologne. Vetiver. Bourbon. Eucalyptus. Cedar. A touch of damp wool drying over smoldering peat bricks. She’d spritz it onto her pillow and dream as if he were curled up beside her. Then she could wake up, and for one, soothing fraction of a moment, think he was still there. She only had a few drops left. The scent was discontinued. He hadn’t slept beside her for years. But the women at the perfumery knew how to mix an expensive clone of the elixir. It wasn’t quite the same. But then, nothing had been. Nothing at all, since he’d died.

 

177

Before The Train

His mother plucked him from the sofa and threw him over her shoulder. She didn’t turn on the basement lights as she ducked into the root cellar. “Shhh! Look, we’re playing hide and seek, okay? It’s a very important game. There will be so much candy if we win. But you must be very quiet. Silent. Shh!” She held him so close he thought she might bruise him. He heard boots stomping upstairs. Doors slammed. Something heavy, maybe the bookshelf, crashed over. Glass shattered. His mother’s heartbeat thumped in his ear. He hoped they’d win. She knew they had to.

 

178

Seeking Approval

She went through with it for the stupidest reason. She didn’t love him, really like him, even. She didn’t care about the cost of that day: the prices of cold dress and the funereal flowers and the hundreds of plates of chicken or fish and the tab at the end of the four-hour open bar. No, she did it because of the likes. She did it because she knew that if she did it, hundreds of people would approvingly click and no matter how dead she felt inside, out there, where everyone could see it, she would look so alive.

 

179

Fostering

Seven bankrupting IVF treatments later, she wandered the beach alone. She scanned the textures before her feet, eyes alert for treasure: an intact shell, a stone of the right color, a bit of glass worn into soothing, pocket–worthy smoothness. Something. Her gaze landed on a perfect sphere, a globe of life. Unhatched, but fertilized. Unborn, but squirming. She carried the fragile egg home, tucked it into a bowl of warm milk. Slowly it expanded and became opaque. When the mermaid hatched, she kissed its cheek, nestled it into a bucket of cool saltwater, and returned, satisfied, to the shore.

 

180

A Gesture

Her last morning in her own home, before she went to the her final residence, a place her children had told her was safer for a woman of her many years, she prayed. Before the car came, she made her way to the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. She lowered her spotted hands and knees into the surf and whispered to the mist, “I baptize all who touch these waters, so that you may be free and strong and blessed. May these waves become holy clouds and fall everywhere, to make my life worthwhile, if only for this prayer.”

 

181

Baby Gifts

The wealthy children gummed on slippery utensils of heavy silver. The poor gnawed shovels of rough and flimsy plastic. He wrapped his lips around a spoon that was more of a weapon than a tool. A rare ivory unavailable to buyers anymore, it both fed him and informed his future. When his baby teeth broke through to daylight, they scraped molecules from it and fed his body a magic too heavy for his kidneys to filter. Once you hold a unicorn’s horn in your mouth, you are safe from danger and poverty, and thus destined to become a reluctant hero.

 

182

A Leader

His parents gnawed on cribs frosted thickly with lead paint. They failed many simple classes. Antagonized many rough police and gentle caregivers. Invited scorn via their reflexive responses to the poisonous element. But he was taken from them before he could taste that sweetly dooming flavor. He was bathed in clean water, and he slept in a crib of untreated oak. His genius stunned his teachers, made his foster parents gasp. His skills intimidated all of the authorities. He majored in chemistry to vindicate his parents’ cruelly stunted potentials, to rewrap the gifts that society had so casually painted over.

 

183

Gift with Purchase

He shopped at thrift stores. His budget barred him from other boutiques and big boxes. No bother: he had a discerning eye that noticed timeless quality. The charcoal coat beckoned him from the rack of colorless cast-offs: sharply tailored, ancient wool, with its elegantly draping lapels and bright buttons of English jet. He tried it on, the interior silk shivering his skin. It fit him magnificently. At home, he stood in front of his cracked mirror and slid his hands into the front pockets. His left hand found the massive ruby clasped in platinum, and his available clothing budget exploded.

 

184

Surveillance

Her boyfriend was controlling, possessive, paranoid, though she gave him no reasons to be so. She thought the pain in her head might be due to his stressful hovering, might be caused by his constant vigilance regarding her locations and activities. She’d never felt the pinch he gave her. She was asleep when he inserted the tracking chip between her skin and shoulder muscle. When her doctor ordered an MRI and she agreed, the machine identified the source of her unease and magnetically ripped it out. The pain was vindicating, freeing, and all the excuse she needed to leave him.

 

185

When Enough Became Enough

He had seen enough. Been to enough places. He had helped many people: so many lovely, silly, horrible people. He’d made many fortunes, and spent them all so well. He’d lived a life too large, too sprawling, to fit into a single memoir. He had loved and lost and won almost a thousand serious times. And he was ready to be done with all of it. He knew the flight he needed to take. The seat he needed to be in. The plane would go down. No one would be found, and his time traveling would reach its final destination.

 

186

A Concentration of Wealth

Her lawyer called and tersely told him that she’d left him everything. All the lands. All the companies and patents. All the homes and boats and all the invaluable art that clung to their insides. All the power and prestige and access and authority. Everything. He gulped. He had no idea what to do with such stuff. He lived in a moldy studio apartment with carpet older than he was. And even more of a conundrum: how could he tell his wife that the woman, whose pool he said he’d only cleaned twice, had given him half of the world?

 

187

Life Force, Undermined

It should unfurl itself once every twenty-five thousand years, give or take an eon. It should conjure hope in the crevices of its golden silky, leathery petals. It should throb with a nectar-bound chemical imbued with a sense of organic optimism so intense and radiant that anything with a nose or even a functioning nerve cell anywhere within its mile-wide radius will begin to vigorously and stridently thrive. It should cast a spell of perseverance so potent that even dying organisms find methods to vigorously procreate while under its spell. But this generation of that vital creature failed to bloom.

 

188

Last Words

What are you doing in this house? I live here. I own it. Really? Prove it. What? Really? Well, I have keys. Whose keys? My keys. Where’d you get those keys? The realtor. When I closed. I closed three years ago. The realtor? Yeah. Her name’s Patty.  She has an office on Stewart Avenue. Patty? What’s her last name? McIntosh? Smith? Sorry. Could you not point that at me? What’s her name? Patty. Her name’s Patty. And your name? Taylor. Like on the utility bills. Don’t get smart with me. Smart? No. I’m not being smart. No. You’re real stupid.

 

189

Servitude

Her basement studio apartment was dim and poorly ventilated. Her mattress propped two feet from the shower curtain. The teal-purple spots between the coils bloomed relentlessly. Her hair smelled like camping. She left before sunrise and returned after dark, fake-smiling in three different restaurants, returning only to shower and sleep before commuting again. She had one degree but seventy-years worth of monthly payments. She lived there four years, until the coroner came to collect her after her lungs hosted a blooming orchard of teal-purple. Before she was cremated, her creditors called her parents, demanding restitution for her four, best years.

 

190

His Fate, a Loose Thread

His office had a shelf jammed tight with sterling trophies. He was kind in selfless ways. Observant, thoughtful and quite capable of completing athletic tasks. Also, he was decidedly handsome. Yet he lived and slept alone. His mother and aunts and friends and neighbors worried about that. At happy hours he’d be back-handledly complimented with the question, “How can you be single?” He had no honest answer, so he sadly shrugged. There’s no mechanism in the universe for letting someone know that their true love’s parents never met, no way of writing a history of what failed to ever happen.

 

191

Modern Changelings

She spat into the plastic vial and mailed the sample away. Now that her mother—her nurturing, loving, devoted mother—was buried under the epitaph “beloved nurse to all,” she felt she could seek her father without causing anyone pain. She did not expect the results. Her genetic mother, it seemed, was alive and well. Her genetic father, too. They had a daughter, born on her birthday: at the same exact hospital. After that daughter spat into her own vial, they all learned that the plastic bracelets that new babies wore could slide on and off far, far too easily.

 

192

How Cults Dwindle

Ask a question too sharp or invasive, and you can lose everything. Your entire family. Your beloved friends. Your comfortable home. Your known past. Your promised future. But her logic outweighed her faith. She asked anyway. She found the answer she was given as unsatisfactory as they found her asking of it. Left with only her present, she wandered away from the compound, into a world far more complex and gorgeous than the elders had let her suspect. When she prayed for help, the only god she’d known refused to answer, and so she became her own key to hope.

 

193

Defense as Offense

As soon as she turned eighteen, she stormed the nearest pharmacy. Her private school didn’t know, couldn’t know. Her parents could never, ever suspect. But she desperately wanted to go to a university where what she carried in her blood mattered. She wanted to live in those precious dorms. Six visits, they told her. She automatically, enthusiastically, agreed. School let out at three. She was expected home by four. And so she ran. Wearing long sleeves each time, she sneakily absorbed the safety of the herd. She collected her immunizations like secret trophies, with a teenager’s insubordinate, prophetic, propelling pride.

 

194

Scapegoat’s Last Contact

Erupting with incandescent hope, he called home. He wanted to share his massive relief. He wanted his enthusiasm to be thunderously echoed back to him with squealing joy and pride. He hoped that this milestone could be a jewel that reflected beautifully onto his entire family. He joyously exhaled, “Mom! I did it! I got tenure!” He ached with hope in the hollow silence he heard in response to his admission. His joy was answered with an angry, hissed reply, “Well, you know, your sister is a notary public.” He didn’t bother with any plans to fly home for Thanksgiving.

 

195

Casting Stones

Give every person touched by a preventable tragedy a brick. Wrapped around the brick, offer them three options for the brick. Option 1: build a traffic barrier between the responsible government body’s parking garage and the exit, demanding action on the issue. Option 2: Write the name of the person harmed by the preventable tragedy and throw this brick through the window of the people who didn’t prevent it. Option 3: Use this brick to build a memorial to the loved ones harmed by this terrible tragedy. This is a potent and effective guerrilla marketing campaign for window replacement companies.

 

196

Temporary Paralysis

The big decisions were obvious. Major in finance? Of course. Move to New York? No doubt. Marry that girl? Immediately. Take the payout? No-brainer. Have the kids? Sure thing! But standing there in that huge, open space, staring at the dozens of paint samples rendered him impotent, ignorant, and confused at once. He felt like someone had asked him where he wanted to have dinner, only dinner would last forever. There were so many infuriating shades of slate gray. They were all the same, but not. Five hours later, his exasperated wife pointed at the bluest one. He was saved.

 

197

Just the Place

Everyone knew that massive, old house was haunted. There were documentaries about it. Tourists took pictures of themselves in front of its iron gates. Dozens of recordings of the screams that burst from the basement every night at two had been heard around the world. The inheritor gave up on selling the place years before: there was no way to conceal its famously horrible contents. So when he received a solid offer, he asked in good conscious if the buyer knew about the screaming. “Oh, of course,” replied the agent, “but interested party is deaf, and looking for a deal.”

 

 

198

The Set-Up

He gave her an allowance of just enough. Or so he thought. Via coupon clipping and aggressive bargain hunting, she hid twenty dollars a week. She kept the money in her tampon box under the sink, and exchanged her small bills for larger ones as she could. She paid the bills, signing his name onto checks where her own was not printed. Two years into her secretive savings campaign, she sprang the trap. An envelope with five thousand dollars, and a note, in his handwriting, which read: “I want her dead,” that she delivered, with false tears, to the police.

 

199

The Girl Who Became President  

She’d been judged. By her lilting accent. By the thread count of her outfits. By the public cost of her personal education. By her parents’ zip code’s property taxes and their credit scores. By the volume of her hairstyle. By the depth of her vocabulary. By the width of her waist. By the raw kindness that her eyes reflected when she was spoken to with cruelty. She was judged to be mostly harmless. And so, when her magnetic power nullified the inert jury who tried to prevent her ascent to that level that had dismissed her, those naysayers incessantly fumed.

 

200

The Pythia’s Agency

She perched soberly upon the tripod, ready. She hid her condescending smile. Plucked from uneducated obscurity, and placed in the sacred chamber without any background preparation, she was prepared nonetheless. Men came from across the country, worried by queries no masculine arguments could supposedly answer. They believed she could articulate the whims of the gods, and stood eagerly before her, desperate for direction. If she heard between her ears a godly message echoing, she would articulate the opposite of her supposition. If the asker of the question were someone she took a disliking to, her answer would hopefully promise his doom. So she pettily influenced Grecian history.

 

201

Death by Unpaid Emotional Labor

He thrashed and kicked, babbled and bicycled his every adult night away. His wife patiently and diligently picked his pillows from the dark floor, retucked his cold blankets, and stroked his twitching back until his body stilled, every night, sometimes multiple times in intimate darkness. At her funeral, in his eulogy, he tearfully explained how since she’d passed he’d been unable to get a good night’s sleep. He said she’d been such a force for peace in his life that he’d always slept well with her beside him, but now, with her gone, he was doomed to never dream again.

 

202

A Two Sided Triangle is an Arrow

Jack’s father went along with the idea of Jack because Jack’s mother had insisted on it; Jacks’ existence was the nuclear bullet point on their marital contract. Two weeks after Jack was born, his mother, inebriated on a cocktail of insidious hormones no one believed she could possibly be full of, drove into a thousand year-old sequoia at seventy miles an hour. Jack’s father had to pretend to take on full emotional custody of the boy. When Jack turned twelve, he waved goodbye instead of hugging his father before he fled into boarding school. Both of them were exceedingly relieved.

 

203

Kicked into Gear

Before the mare’s hoof made contact with her skull, she’d been quiet, ladylike, and ignorable. After? She called her former friends rapists in public. She began to swear and stomp and roll her eyes. She stopped wearing eyelashes, ponytails, and coats made of keratin she didn’t grow herself. She ate scandalous quantities of whatever nutrients her body desired. She stopped smiling when her father’s friends spoke. Her fiancé evaporated. The ones who knew her previously looked around nervously and set their teacups down when they noticed her out loud. Even with her dented head, she felt far saner than them.

 

204

Suburban Development

He grew up on a street officially named Maple Avenue, but he secretly knew it as Harm’s Way. His neighbors to the north amalgamated methamphetamine. His neighbors to the south facilitated the destruction of desperate women. And in his own dim house, where his parents passed through like oblivious shadows, he read. Hiding between covers of books for years, he absorbed thousands of ideas and opinions about a world he’d never seen but eventually understood. After a graduation unattended by anyone who clapped for his name, he became an insightful property speculator. He knocked down everything, and planted maple saplings.

 

205

History Rhymes

The eighties: His father felt it was the best of times. His mother felt it was the worst of times. He felt it was just an ordinary series of days. The oughts: When his father died, he promised to continue the family legacy. When his mother died, he promised to do things better, going forward. The thirties: When he knew his death approached, he asked his son to do his best, in whatever from that took. And when that son went off to a great war to battle Nazis, he hoped his descendants would learn from his family’s exceptional experiences.

 

206

Benevolent Sexism

She was wary the mechanic would rip her off, like all the others had. But in her eyes he saw the determined sparkle of the wife whose precious ashes lived in his glove box in a velvet pouch. According to the diagnostics, his customer needed new brakes. He replaced them. And her transmission. And a questionable axle. And all the fluids. And the bearings in the back. And the wipers. And all of the belts, just to be sure. When she picked up her car, he told her nothing was amiss, and sent her on her way without an invoice.

 

207

Love Line

The number said unknown. She was lonely enough to answer. “Do you have time to talk about your life insurance needs?” She did. But she had no one a life insurance company could help. She said as much. “Same,” sighed the caller, “I mean, I work in a call center for minimum wage.”  They talked for hours. The caller lost his job over that conversation. He moved to her town. She got an outfit she thought he’d like. He did the same. When asked how they’d met at their wedding, they said they’d met at work, which was halfway true.

 

208

The Last Unicorn

At the edge of a sunken cliff, the narwhal surfaced. He’d sought a mate for too many years, and never finding her, let his horn fall beneath the waves for the last time. With his last exhalation, his body became unbouyant, and his soul crested off toward somewhere else. His shell fell into a salty darkness, became a temporary extension of metabolic futures for creatures below him on the food chain. As his body sank below a hundred meters, the satellite that talked to the signal stapled to his dorsal fin stopped recording. Like the land unicorns, he became mythic.

 

209

Swamp Justice  

Vomit crusted on her shirt sleeves. She had socks but not shoes on her feet. Her sweater was gone. Her collar was ripped. Her scalp burned where silky tufts had been yanked from her. Her underwear had been taken as a trophy. Her phone and wallet absorbed fetid swamp water a few yards from her consciousness. Her bruised mouth coughed, half full of slippery dirt. She made fists in the silt. They thought they’d left her with nothing. But her most powerful weapon—her craving for vengeance—had only been sharpened. Her uncles and would all be dead within days.

 

210

Her Audience of One

She drew undiscovered worlds. Painted unseen places. When she died, she left a tidy apartment with all of her work stacked in dated and numbered piles. Her long lost but never sought out grandson was haphazardly delegated the task of sorting it all out. He’d always thought of himself as a boring person, someone born lacking the gift of artistry. But as he staggered through her unappreciated works, he realized he was someone infused with genetic creativity: was potentially capable of conjuring novelty. His muse screamed at him from another dimension, and he promised her he’d pick up a paintbrush.

 

211

Black Plague: Day One

He snorted. He whimpered. He ached with burning fear. He wiped his ragged whiskers with his raw forepaws. He sniffed the wind, hoping for fair air tainted by edible promise. He scampered crookedly toward the hope of food, his half rotten tail dragging behind him like a broken anchor. The fleas that clung to his oily clumps of fur shared his hope: inside their blood, terrible hunger. He found a musty home, jostling with creatures larger and stronger than he. The boils on his belly wept into a musty woolen blanket of theirs, and his fleas jumped to fairer shores.

 

212

Before She Chewed the Chip Out of Her Skin

Her boss sat across from her, smug and seething, “I see you arrived late to three meetings this week.” The subordinate had no explanatory response. She’d been constantly dashing from meeting to meeting, from building to building, and had no idea which meetings, or where, might have been clocked as tardy. She offered her only possible excuse, “But all my work was done.” Her boss sucked air through her yellow teeth. “I’m going to put you on probation. One more late arrival and you’ll be gone.” The subordinate shuddered, knowing her eviction was imminent, and said, “Thanks for the opportunity.”

 

213

The Vegan Cannibal

Her mother built a cabin of gingerbread and caulked it with frosting. She took a more humanistic approach: waiting until the children slept, then sneaking into their homes with sharply magical shears. She snipped bits of hair and kneaded it in a putrid putty augmented by rare spores and mouthfuls of chewed skin she’d scraped from the children’s feet with her sharp nails while they dreamed. This dough she sunk into the damp ground around her hut. She lived to harvest mushrooms infused with the essence of the lively young. She never lacked for sustenance or missed a PTA meeting.

 

214

A Buffet that Never Satisfies

She downloaded all the apps. Someone, lurking on one of them, hopefully, maybe, could surely love her forever for exactly what she was. She doubted this mathematically preposterous assumption, but acted as if she didn’t, because she was an optimist. She knew that her off-putting color and her unusual size and her serious interest in astrophysical propulsion would narrow her options, but nonetheless: she threw herself into the sexual lottery system. Surprised then, she was, when thousands of men opted into her strange, ravenous demands. She devoured them all, but kept hoping that eventually, someday, she’d meet a fellow extraterrestrial.

 

215

Detonation

Her husband warned her not to go near, and to never, ever open that gun safe in the basement. “Most dangerous things in there. Could destroy you in an instant. Promise me,” he said when she moved in. She kept that promise easily; had no curiosity about whatever explosives were locked away inside the dusty box. But ten years after he passed, she was selling the house and most everything in it. She opened the safe for the liquidator. Inside, no guns. No ammunition. Just thousands of love letters going back decades, signed with a lovely name that wasn’t hers.

 

216

Bury Him in Branded Pajamas

He’d hated that show. The theme song, written as if designed to torture captives with its frenetic, screaming accordions and psychedelically babbling ukuleles. The animation’s nuclear-neon colors intensely offended his senses of taste and vision. He hated the high-pitched pretend-child voices of the characters that squealed too often over too little. The toys based on the program were cheap and overpriced and they littered his floor. But here he was, late at night, on his fourteenth episode. He wished his son were watching with him, but the boy was on the other side of town in a medically induced dream.

 

217

The Crystalized Grudge

His mother kept the coveted paperweight on her desk, between screen and keyboard. To him, there was nothing more sacred on earth than that squat tower of imperfect quartz. One morning before school, he snatched it and hid it in his pocket, where it glowed with holy light and fire only he could sense. He showed his gentle friends, knowing they would smile. Then, suddenly, a larger boy, not his friend, snatched it from his hand and dashed it into shards on the playground concrete. His mother forgave him. He never forgave his nemesis, who he brutally shattered years later.

 

218

A Perpetual Familiar

She curled onto her side, knees bent, hands under her pillow. Her poodle nestled his snout upon her calves, under the covers. Once settled, the two snoozed in warm co-tended peace. Such was their bedtime routine for fourteen years. And long after the poodle had been covered with ground, the woman still sometimes awoke, the backs of her thighs cold, and between sleep and wakefulness, worried where her companion was. Decades later, riddled with cancer, the woman turned to her side, pulled up her feet, tucked her hands under her pillow, and felt a comforting, familiar weight behind her knees.

 

219

Cryptophasia

In high school, they’d dated each other’s future wives. In college, they’d shared notes on all classes and quizzes. After graduation, they joined the same firm. They lived two blocks apart. Drove the same make and model of vehicle. Smirked with the same knowledge that carved a crease into the right side of their cheeks. They acted as each other’s alibi as often as needed, no questions ever asked or needing to be answered. And though they weren’t identical twins, the brother and sister felt that when they saw each other, they saw the best version of themselves grinning back.

 

220

Uncolonized Goddess

She waited for him below the willow branches whose shadows tumbled into the shallow and potable stream. Moths fluttered around her and sunlight filtered over her through living leaves, showering her in a confetti of natural sparkle. She was regal and powerful and fertile. He wanted to marry her, in the possessive, not partnering, sense. He wanted her father’s power. She revered the waters and fields and mountains and horizons her father’s name supposedly owned. She wanted to grant the trees citizenship, the animals and the birds: paperless visas. When they met, he was easily annihilated. Her territory remained wild.

 

221

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Savior

Above the scarf, a beard. Below the cloak, breasts. In the pockets, iron. In the satchel, seeds. Four hundred years after the last smartphone was minted, a century after the last of the satellites had fallen, this figure arrived. This gentle presence offered ancient, crumbling books written in a strange series of glyphs, explaining the sources of life. This gentle presence knew equations that could build material structures and elaborate abstract emotions. The bearded face smiled with maternal longing. The creatures they met clung to that cloak with hope and love. The inarticulate longings of their shared ancestors were invigorated.

 

222

Half-Step

His true love’s parents were killed in a car accident when she was seven. Immediately afterward, she became his sister. That’s how guardianship works, legally, sometimes. She moved into the guest room. She went from being someone he could honestly confide in to someone he had to tiptoe around. Her hurt was her greatest asset, in his house. His was invisible, unmentionable. He loved her in ways than were no longer discussable. When they were both fifty, after his parents eventually followed hers, he could finally say what they’d both felt since they were seven. Love: wrong and right simultaneously.

 

223

Hedging Futures

He half-groomed a half-dozen successors. None of them felt confident in a future based purely on his tentative promises, and so set off on routes he couldn’t follow. The old man assumed they’d eventually fight among themselves for his blessing, for his massive riches. The opposite occurred. None of his potential heirs cared to deal with him again: too little financial upside, too much fraught emotional work. When the ancient patriarch finally had to delegate his fortune, he found no genetic takers. His wife laughed, and sent her children gifts of congratulations. She’d always kept a lover on the side.

 

224

Professional Refugees

A bomb hit his hospital. His surgery burned. His wife said they would be fine; she was an accountant after all, could cover their expenses. He began tending to the wounded without pay. A bomb hit her professional building. Her office incinerated. He said they would be fine; someone would surely assist them soon. They both knew otherwise. More bombs fell. She learned to help him tend to the injured. He learned to forge papers. A bomb hit their neighborhood. They fled across a sea. They drowned with five degrees between them, but only one away from someone who cared.

 

225

Regrets of Chances Past

She was haunted by ghosts of her future. They gave her has many nightmares as they did motivations. Herself as a captain of industry, sternly straight-backed and expensively tailored. Herself as matriarch, surrounded by angelic children and perfumed by the smell of rising bread. Herself as an artist, paint-stained and drunk on the poetry of sunlight. Herself as a vet, arm-deep in the wet interior of a nervous bovine. But she knew none of those ghosts could possibly be real. She asked her customers how their meals tasted, and tried to ignore the specters in the back of her mind.

 

226

The Former Priest

He’d never fought the winds of fate. He abjured what he he’d been told was selfish or impossible or rewarding. Acquiesced to the needs of anyone within his proximity. Those who knew him described him as helpful and generous and celibate. One night he fumed and smashed glass and drywall he could not afford to replace on his patient salary. He had a cold burrito, a hot whisky, and a revelation. The next day, his unassuming manager demanded even more of his soul in units of time he could no longer afford to sell. He packed up, and never returned.

 

227

Mermaid’s Honeymoon

Her new spouse recoiled when she sang sultry songs under salty moonlight for strange men. He hated that she sang so seductively for those others, but never crooned like that for him. Her songs echoed further than his arms could reach. Her voice, more intoxicating than any drink he could mix her. His jealousy made the veins on his forehead bulge and his fists clench. She’d promised him her love, but he heard otherwise. Until. She hauled her catch back to their lair, flopped a naked, blue-skinned sailor onto the barnacled hearth and cooed, “Darling, I sing for you, always.”

 

228

Vegetarian Kindergartener

He kept having the nightmare. The same one. The hideously vivid one, complete with thunderous slurping sounds and foul barnyard smells, where wire-coated pigs found their way under his covers and smeared his legs with hot snout snot before snapping his bones. He told his mother why he screamed in the night. She told him it was nothing, nothing at all, that dreams were just dreams. Weeks later, with the nightmares never slowing in their frequency, he asked her what trees bacon grew from. She explained the source of his breakfast, and he knew he’d been visited by vengeful ghosts.

 

229

Third Date

“Would you like the good news or the bad news first?” He chose bad news. Best to get it over with. The doctor spoke slowly and clearly but with a smirk, her hands still covered with bloody, viscous slime. The man took in the fact with a shrug, and a smile previous men she’d told this news to had lacked. “And the good news?” he asked, hopeful. “Well,” she sighed, “Though I am a failure in the kitchen, I am able to order in whatever sounds good.” He kissed her cheek, threw out the ruined roast, and called for pizza.

 

230

The Last Synod

“Ordain the opposite sex? That goes against eons of practice! That goes against all we know! Our delicate and powerful rituals, our sacred and precious sacraments, all of them, are imbued with their authority because they are performed by us, and only we have been granted those rights by God Herself. How could we even consider anyone other than ourselves to undertake such vital actions?” The coven nodded in greedy agreement. True, recruitment had waned significantly this century. But was it better to let their magnificent religion die, rather than change this one, small detail? The elderly assembly thought so.

 

231

Learned Behaviors

Every time he attempted to share a moment of pride, or the news of an award, or an experience of childish joy, his mother would yank his collar and hiss in his ear, “Shhh! You’ll make your brother feel bad.” And so he learned to keep good news of all kinds to himself, where it could almost glow. In the prime of his career he was awarded a prestigious fellowship, worthy of vats of headline ink. His wife brought home champagne and flowers, but he recoiled at her offerings. He’d automatically assumed she’d be furious at his newly acquired prestige.

 

232

First Kiss

They’d been so happlily nervous, hoping like drunken lottery ticket holders. Both brushed and flossed for three days in hopeful anticipation. New clothes had been purchased and expensive soaps had been wetted in the roiling desire of: THIS. Please blurred to thank you as soon as their lips met. Four eyes shut, four hands pulling on shoulders: the cold inertness of their many shivering, isolated nights evaporated and was immediately replaced with a steaming furnace of nocturnal sunlight that burned the sustainable fuel of their reciprocated satisfaction. They paused to breathe. Both began planning their now, finally, inevitably, shared future.

 

233

Fictional Urgency

Beside the king’s throne stood a monumental hourglass that held as many grains of sand as seconds allotted to his reign. He’d been told by the priests who installed it: his lifespan was linked perfectly to the flow of its sand. Picturing the grains falling in his mind, he grew impulsive, ascetic, frenetic and exhausted. And so he spent little time hesitating, pondering, celebrating, or enjoying any of his own moments. When the last silica jewel fell, he gasped: for all he’d done, he’d no idea if any of it would be worth noting. He ruled another twenty, joyful years.

 

234

A Very Nice Guy

Things he claimed to despise: Comic Sans, fast-casual restaurants, successful jam bands, network television dramas, colonialism (not withstanding his inherited estate), late capitalism, his unearned stock options. Things he claimed to love: Helvetica, Bach, graphic novels, Japanese denim, endangered species, equality for all people. He lived alone in an enormous apartment with a view of a sparkling, acidic sea, but inside which he only focused internally, with help from his blackout shades and movies. He stocked his elevated bunker with mid-century furniture and shelves of enviable brands of brown, Scottish ethanol. He wondered why no one protested on his behalf.

 

235

Why Did You Leave Your Last Job?

My managers thought: I was either too terse or too verbose, too sexy or too conservative, too outspoken to too timid, too creative or too pragmatic, too young or too experienced, too educated or too ambitious, too tough or too fragile, too large or too petite, too silly or too stern, too fancy or too cheap, too talkative or too quiet, too accommodating or too pushy, too honest or too unreadable, too cynical or too optimistic, too patient or too motivated, too intense or too easy-going, too invisible or too accomplished, too junior or too senior. You see: I’m fifty.

 

236

Just Passing Through

He’s bilingual, but pretends not to be: poses as verbally deaf in places where his native tongue is spoken. The slurs he absorbs are nothing compared to the slurs he could, but would never, deploy. He knows this, and feels shame, despite his affinity for the communities his lighter skin trespasses in. His parents live on obvious sides of this discussion, while he is forced to straddle it. He knows he can never be flexible enough to hold both sides together. The officer approaches him. He bellows his father’s accent. The policeman apologizes. He continues on his way, doubly furious.

 

237

The Policeman’s Research

True crime is compelling. Knowing how murderers work, the steps they take, the circumstances of their crimes: it gives nervous listeners a sense of second-hand safety, as if knowing what happened to someone else might save them from it. Consequently, murderers obviously treasure the genre. It lets them know how police respond, what evidence gets processed, which victims get ignored. And so he worked in the shadow of a waving red flag nobody had ever once noticed. If anybody ever caught him, his story would throw all the others into embarrassing relief. So on he went, compulsively listening to podcasts.

 

238

The Shame Hoarder

He heard the word minimalism and immediately gravitated toward it: the open, calming space within and beyond its philosophy, the cleanliness of its dustless promises, the lightness of owning next to nothing: flavorlessly delicious. He rid himself of mite-gnawed books and unopenable boxes, shed formerly shared linens, stuffed dumpsters full of melancholy jetsam. He disposed of objects he had too many of and refused any new three dimensional item sneak into his life. But alone in his sleek apartment, his brain as full as ever of thoughts he wished he could bag and exile to a landfill, he felt claustrophobic.

 

239

The Orphan’s Chore

He’d had the entire series of vaccinations that would prevent what had happened to his mother from happening to him. He knew that even if she bit him with her ragged mouth, his heart would keep beating. He knew that even if she tore at his skin with her black claws, his blood would remain red, unlike the black sludge that filled her. He knew that even if she spat in his face, his eyes would not liquefy, as hers had. He knew all of this, but still feared entering her pen when it was his turn to feed her.

 

240

How Cats Became Smarter Than Us

He was a novel and magnificent mutant. The offspring of a tabby mother and mystery, he captivated everyone at the shelter. His massive eyes bulged, wet obsidian marbles, from his skull, a skull that held a profoundly mighty brain: one dense with rapidly, constantly, firing neurons. But before he could be fixed and adopted out, he used his sharp mind and claws to pick the lock of his crusty enclosure, tap in the code to unlock the main door, and bound into the night: where he went from being one-of-a-kind to being the first of a long and robust lineage.

 

241

Middle Class Purgatory Ritual  

Every morning he opens his eyes, he awakes in the place equidistant heaven and hell, at exactly the midpoint on the taught line that yawns from doom to salvation. You see, he has a family. A wife who hides her silver hopes under a lifetime of condescending tarnish and two children with golden, uncertain futures they must dunk daily in the acid-bath of fear. Every day, those precious fragile people might finally thrive or suddenly sicken, might comfortably rise to polished power, could abruptly tumble into vats of tarry despair. And so he made them a pot of strong coffee.

 

242

The Hoard

Her father flippantly tossed the property at the woman he’d haphazardly impregnated, as her price of silence. Her mother lived there for all that daughter’s life, and left everything, absolutely everything, there for her only child to make sense of. Horror gives violence a slippery feel inside the ears. So when the front door creaked, that daughter felt comforted. Rusty friction is music compared to shimmering dread. Inside, she knew she’d find piles. Of trash. Of torment. Her mother’s life deeply engraved upon the heaps, a life spent hoping what was painfully gross might someday be worth something to someone.

 

243

Bodily Reactions

He had a dozen tissues in his pocket, just in case. And when he was afraid, or nervous, or otherwise mentally overwhelmed, he pressed one to a nostril. “Why are you laughing, Grandma?” asked the innocent child. “Oh, well, you see,” cooed the matriarch, as she considered her glistening knuckle, “when you get to be my age, and you wipe your nose, you’re always very happily surprised that it wasn’t blood.” Her grandson reached into his pocket, squeezed an iron-stained tissue as tight as he could, and replied, “Blood isn’t all that bad. It just means you really, really care.”

 

244

Self Care

He blamed his cystic acne on her thoughtlessness. She should have made him a dermatology appointment. He blamed his excess weight on her cooking. She shouldn’t dish out carbohydrates. He blamed the distance of his family on her failure to construct and ship out Christmas cards. He blamed her for his shabby wardrobe. She should have brought him new things when she went to the stores with her friends. He held her responsible for his slumping posture. Couldn’t she see that he needed a better office chair? “Take care of yourself,” she said, as she packed up all her things.

 

245

Priorities

When she smelled the smoke, she threw off her covers and dashed to her office. Her files. All those precious documents. Proof of all she was and all she owned. Her future, her potential, all her efforts: they could not be allowed to burn. She couldn’t move the safe, and so she carried the loose sheets hurriedly up the smoky stairs in her shaking, sweating hands. When she stumbled over the porch, she saw her husband and two children huddling in the yard, illuminated by the orange glow of their flaming home. He said nothing as she hugged her papers.

 

246

Liquidation

He went to estate sales searching for bargains, but these prices were absurdly cheap. A dollar for a crate of antique silver. Two dollars for an enormous, pristine Persian rug. He sought out the executor, who was happily taking pennies when he should have been collecting a fortune. “You know you can ask much more for all of this. I’d hate to see you settle for so little.” The executor smiled, “I’m fine with the prices as marked. My aunt—this was her house—well, she left everything she had to my brother, and I don’t much care for him.”

 

247

A Better Life Than We Had

His embryo was selected due to the high marks it earned in the categories of physical height, assertiveness, and cerebral agility. Despite markers that warned of antisocial inclinations and a strong propensity toward impulsivity, his parents opted to place his ball of cells into the growth chamber. They discarded his potential siblings, all of them viable but far less fashionably impressive according to the spreadsheet. When his time in the tempered-glass chamber concluded, doctors rinsed off his feeding brine and presented him, belly-buttonless (an unmistakable signifier of elevated standing), to his parents: two short, softly spoken, rather average-minded rich people.

 

248

There Was Nutmeg In Everything

“She’s allergic? Really allergic, or she just doesn’t like it? So high maintenance! I have always wondered how you can handle that kind of energy in your life, why you chose to live with it. You know that’s my signature dish! The centerpiece of the meal! Honestly. I’m hosting. It’s my kitchen. She can deal with my generosity. She can eat around her supposed allergy. You could have married Judy, now that’s a girl I wouldn’t mind cooking for.” After going into anaphylactic shock on Thanksgiving, the woman who was not Judy had her mother-in-law swiftly convicted of attempted murder.

 

249

A Thing Done For Love

She held his hot, wet cheek in her warm, dry hand and looked into his fearful eyes. “We will fix this right up.” He believed her and was happy to feel that faith in his throat. She ran a dry washcloth under warm water. Touched its moisture gently to his red knee. She examined the wound. “Not so bad!” She smeared a bit of clear medicine on his scrape. He winced. “You are being so brave!” She kissed his forehead. He wished his parents might one day be as kind to him as his nanny was. He’d fallen on purpose.

 

250

Transactions

Her broker grinned as he dorkily danced down the stairs into the lobby. He took both her hands in his and told her in a giddy whisper, “Your trust in me, it paid off.” She’d let him invest a measly sum years ago, after he’d turned her down for a date. She hadn’t seen him since or even bothered to open her statements. She was forty-seven and felt she was behind on everything: money, love, work: everything. In the glow of her account balance, all nine figures of it, she wondered if now, maybe, he’d have finally coffee with her.