Jasmine spends an extra ten minutes in the hostel shower trying to scratch the black sand out from under her toenails, in haphazard...

Of course, he’d be born on a Sunday. A day I use to believe in, now holds weight heavier than my swollen belly. The June morning started...

The first time Nicole encounters him, they are at a youth event, one of those big multi-church affairs, across several days. Nicole’s...

I stole a lot of things when I was 13 and 14. My family lived in Virginia Beach then. My father, who’d been an enlisted man in the U.S....

A man squeezes into the middle seat beside me. ‘Could they make these seats any smaller?’ he puffs. I don’t answer, pressing my face...

I was skin and bone my mother said and she was right, I was Grapes of Wrath skinny, but I  guess Mr. Smalley understood hunger, its...

The dog settles herself in the front seat, her head on the armrest, dozing. You flick through the radio stations until you find something...

When the golf tournament in Sowetos’ slum started, no one thought it was real. It was a joke, a rumor, and a puff of smoke out of...

The boyfriend is a Timothy McVeigh sympathizer, he said he knew McVeigh before he got the microchip in his buttocks. I think he’s...

How long had we been staring at her tiny body? Twenty seconds? Twenty minutes? She was doing her magic trick: breathing in through her...

Once Stu decides to leave, that’s it (except not really, no, not at all).  He moves into action at once (or, at least, he tells himself...

I was standing outside the theater with Redford after the show, mingling with what was left of the crowd. It was a cold, late-fall...

It’s a Seiko wall model hung in the middle of the waiting room. The battery is still working, but the second hand is stuck. It jitters in...

She looks spent. The coldness of the light has saturated her skin and her eyes and even her hair. They look dull and flat and hard like...

It was her, Clara Hart. It had been nearly fifteen years since I had seen her, but the name returned with the impact of a reckoning. She...

Koltyn liked Cinnamon Toast Crunch best. It turned him into a giant, grinding dozens of tiny pieces of toast between his teeth, savoring...

Lewis Vern was a self-proclaimed ludologist—that is, he claimed to know all things games. To his credit, he had mastered four different...

On a breathless night in Malta, light fragmented by bedroom shutters pries Maria’s eyes open. She leaves her empty bed. The church bells...

I’ve figured out that if I run the bath for 10 minutes on full heat and two minutes ice-cold, the water in my clawfoot tub will reach the...

I. Quest Before what happened to Christine, before arriving in Iraq, before even leaving Nebraska, all we knew for sure was  that there...