There are only five things Molly would miss if she killed herself. She would miss her vape. She’d miss the taste of its hazelnut coffee-like pulls and the exhaled clouds that take up more space in …

Here in Westerville, the City Services Department handled weed complaints from picky residents who value beautiful lawns. For a modest fee, crews would pick up well-sorted yard waste three times per …

The World is ending. In twenty-six minutes the servers that sustained the World for almost thirty years, housed in datacenters strewn across three continents, will emit their death rattles. Players …

I said to him that I had been trying to write a story in a Ring Lardner sort of style. He asked me what a Ring Lardner sort of style was. Ring Lardner was a writer of humorous stories, I said…

Lying in bed with Kevin, I’m playing a game of boredom chicken. I won’t reach for my phone until he does. I’m in the crook of his arm, looking at his out-of-focus face. Now that we’ve done …

Mr. Gland said he wanted my hair for a wig because his wife was bald from cancer treatments. I said there are other wigs that she could have, surely, and he said true, but my hair perfectly matched …

You enter from the garage to the wag of dog tails and the sound of their sharp nails on hardwood. Work has drained and exhausted you. You have reflux, eyestrain, a slight throbbing in the temples. …

For her, wearing a watch wasn’t necessary. If you pay attention to the air, to the light in the air, to how light fastens to things, you can tell time. In summer it’s easier, but in …

Mattress City USA was tucked off a busy road in a strip-mall that included a gas station known for car-jackings, a down-at-heel florist's shop, and a daycare with grease-paint drawings of rainbows, …

Mme Rimbaud got a new haircut. Une coupe nouvelle. It isn't as good as the old haircut. It has no puff, no coiffed look. Someone needs to floof it. Mme Rimbaud lives in her afterlife wearing her …

Dressing for work the day after her fifty-third birthday, W— struggled to get into her favorite sweater.  Supple and soft, roomy but flattering, this sweater, but today it felt as if the …

Systems Engineer Higata was a modest man, but if pride ever thrummed inside him, it was because he had found the secret to a happy existence. 

“Dudes,” Gwen calls to us from the porch. “Get thee the fuck out here.”             Sunil and I set down our beers …

In a building with twelve floors, we are on the sixth, crouching in the bathroom. I have not seen you this way in years, running my fingers over each bone, counting them: fourteen small, hard parts …

In the summer between seventh and eighth grade, my dad’s brother, Uncle Roy, came to look after my sister Missy and me while our parents watched our Grandma Lori die.

Music was serious to me — and so was anger.

With their hands clasped and knuckles squeezed white, the newlyweds descended the church steps. Flashing cameras froze the tossed rice in midair. Later that day at the crime scene, when the detective …

We’re Facetiming from our apartments. I’m up in Inwood, happy that my housemates aren’t home but anxious they might return and overhear our conversation. Angie is in Carroll Gardens where she …

When I ask him what his favorite kinds of pretzels are, he says rods. I tell him those are better than sourdough, but nothing beats traditional. He asks me how I define “traditional” and before I …

The summer my grandmother’s fugues started, my mom was working two jobs, one as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital and another as a freelance secretary in a small translation house that sent her …