A scorpion stung my foot in the shower. Again. But this time I became so sick I had to stay in bed for three days. The leg started to swell and swell, higher and higher all the way to the thigh, it scared me. The pain radiated, foot to belly. I puked. At the end of the...

Sometimes at night, wild zombies roam. They wander past, or into our house, and rustle

through the downstairs looking for life. Sometimes, when the moon is high, you can spot one loping down the street.

We used to hear them from the bedroom scratching and sighing, rollin...

The habits of the Buck-Fifty Boyfriend might best be described as unpredictable, though they may also be considered odd. In light of his status as a poet, the Buck-Fifty Boyfriend often finds himself drawn to literary events and the people who organize or participate i...

Your options are limited. Relent, as you always do, and determine to renew your efforts to save the petty cash you get from household chores and reading the Bible (you get a quarter for every page) so that you can buy a car when you are sixteen. When you are driving, t...

People will see your face and think they know you from somewhere, didn’t she used to be somebody, will have forgotten how they knew you before, how they wept before, for your tragedy. What a dangerous world, they’ll say.

At noon, the women move into the house. It is one story, wooden, abandoned. There are shotgun shells rusting under the deck. Plates have been broken. At the property line: scrub weed overgrowth, a paddock rotting at the joints, earth torn to red and filled with rain in...

I’d never watched a pregnancy progress so closely before, but I knew Lilly’s was anything but ordinary. She didn’t even smile like a properly pregnant woman—her dry lips spreading wide, almost as menacing as the crack in the tile leading the cave beneath our house. Her...

Do you imagine that floors are flat? They are not. As with many things, this cannot be perceived from afar. Most see the ground as though from the window of an airplane. They miss the details. But if you press your cheek to the kitchen floor, and keep it there long eno...

The first time I hear from Other Susan is on a Saturday morning, in the form of a long and overly apologetic email. She says she’s been in town for three days, and is writing from a computer in the public library. She wanted to approach me in person, but didn’t think i...

It began, possibly, when a tiny cry—mom, say—arrived from some net-nowhere on some anonymous Eve’s Facebook page, and then multiplied so rapidly as to be lost, secreted behind the veil of a precipitous inflation.

It began—this much is certain—with the childless, and mor...