The first time Mary-ann-with-a-hyphen ever saw any part of me unclothed, I was showing her a dog bite on the back of my thigh. I couldn’t see the bite for myself except in the mirror, and the image was too far away for inspection. I wanted someone to examine the bite up close and tell me how bad it really looked. But maybe I was already in love with her. The bite had felt huge to my fingertips, as large as the lump in my throat when she bent her head close to my leg, but I knew from experience...

For eight months Barry had been breathing on his own, but breathing very shallowly. His hands had drawn up and so had his feet, even though the physical therapist massaged his limbs twice daily. Surrounded by those who were dying of advanced age, the twelve-year-old boy was neither dying nor living. Soon a decision would need to be made, a decision about extraordinary measures.

It had been J.W’s brother, Bee-bop, who found Barry covered with blood in the road. Bee-bop was Bee-bop because he always put the same foot forward when he walked. Bee-bop was worse off than J.W., and...

Carol thinks of the relationship as an inoculation that took, a live culture that raised a festering scab. And after the healing is complete, the scar will protect her in the future from ever … from ever being so vulnerable again. But it’s not that simple. She’s not the same. She remembers how daylight, streaking suddenly into the bedroom and over Steven’s chest that first, bright morning, set his tattoo on fire. With each rise and fall of his breath, the coiled, indigo snake undulated, feigning a strike.

Other mornings, once their weekend routine with each other was established, she...

When I was little my dad gave me a book on Indians, and I spent hours searching watercolor paintings of pueblo dwellings, mentally climbing carved hand and foot holes up high rock walls to hewn-out cliff houses, shallow caves in the rock. I studied the paintings of girls my age toting pottery jars of water on their heads all the way from the river. The Indian girls were dressed in skirts made of animal skins. They were strong and deliberate in their motions, and I tried to imagine myself walking all the way from the river balancing a crockery pot...

Tina Marie loved the zoo and every fuzzy creature, even the monkeys, which she thought were mean, noisy, and stinky, scratching around in each other’s fur and pulling out bugs. The other kids in Tina Marie’s second-grade class stood with her, forming a line around the monkey cage, laughing at their antics, until the teacher’s aide, Mrs. Brighton, said, “Come on everyone, we’re going to tour the Reptile House.”

Tina Marie was skipping ahead, until she got close enough to see the giant cobra banner slung over the entrance. She did not love snakes, even though she had never seen...

There’s something about looking down on Graceland that can make you feel all shook up inside. You can drive there making all kinds of jokes about maybe seeing a Ken-doll-sizedKinghitchhiking on the side of the road, somewhere on Interstate 81 looking for Memphis, but it’s like when you get there, you have to shut your mouth, paralyzed, and just gape at the whole of this weird, wild creation that contains such a thing. It’s too much. I don’t know. The hardest part for me is that I get so sidetracked thinking about the husband of the woman who...

We found her face down in the sand, one slightly bent arm extended over her head, one arm at her side, as if swimming. She wore a small wedge of polyester, and her hair felt sticky from saltwater. I don’t remember which one of us first spotted her, which one turned her bright blue eyes into the sun. Her perfectly applied blue eye shadow had not smeared or run when she journeyed through the surf. You wore a black one-piece and carried Barbie on your palm. I wore a two-piece that I was constantly tugging up or down.

“Some little...

Two girls, big and little, so sisterly, and alone, ride the waves, their father’s fast bursts of speed, in the backseat of the family’s new car, into the past or into the future. These two look so similar, not because of who they are, but because of what they’ve seen. One has seen Daddy throw a box of china dishes after her down the stairs, the winding, long stairs of the parents’ house. This one got away and never said a word, and afterwards he never spoke about his gesture. One has seen Daddy raging with a steak knife, saying,...

It was one of the things my father tried to do.

It was something he worked on with a shovel and a garden hose, at five in the morning while we slept.

And when we woke, he was out there without a hat or gloves. For days the temperature had been below freezing. Snow had iced over the ground, so that we had to stamp through a hard crust to keep from falling.

Mother and I stood at the window staring down into the backyard. “Go get him,” my mother said, cinching her robe tight.

Our backyard was tiered, not...

This is for you, other, you who know nothing from the inside except your own sensation. And this is for me and for my sister, the only close relation not containing the word other. And this is by me, the woman writing the story after the abortion. I, who am loathed in too many directions to measure by points of the compass—I, who am neither magnetized needle nor thorn. To you, who hate my body and the biosphere equally. And to you, who call killing the enemy love of country. To you, who daily rededicate your “Field of Blood”...

Snakeman walks to his mailbox, a short hike down a steep gravel drive, and pulls two government-blue envelopes, one a month old and one just-issued, like aces in a bad hand, from the mishmash of brittle discount store circulars and competing church bulletins. After scribbling a signature on the checks, he sets the preaddressed bank envelope in the mailbox and raises the red flag.

Snakeman does not sport a bushy beard or even a mustache. He achieves smooth skin with a few swipes of a straight razor polished against an old leather strop and uses a scrap of side mirror...

There’s the intermittent wail of a truck horn—oogah,oogah—followed by a pause in which the sound almost dies, hesitates, then wails again, filling the valley, bouncing like a body on a trampoline off the surface of the creek up to the neighbors’ doors across the valley. If those doors happen to be open, the sound barrels right in, a nosy neighbor, an uninvited guest.

The neighbors used to wonder if cows were somehow being herded to this repetitive, arrhythmic beat, but one day a night shift worker, trying to get his sleep, went over there in anger. He...

Sarah was winding a familiar two-lane road, legs already sweat-stuck to her seat, when she encountered a German Shepherd running toward her car with its flaccid tongue dangling wildly. Honking her horn, she slowed to evade the dog’s erratic gait, but it veered toward her tires, intent on being hit. She managed to swerve and miss, then she veered back into her lane to avoid a collision with an oncoming pickup.

Still breathing heavily after her close call, she spotted another dog, a tan, floppy-eared hound, sitting, just sitting, between the railroad tracks alongside the road as if tied there,...

The string from the bare bulb flew out of his hand and stuck somewhere above his head in the rafters. The light did not come on. Mr. Moore grappled with the air, pawed empty space. He almost lost his balance and felt a sharp stabbing in his knee. Gathering himself in stillness, he took a series of deep, slow breaths and edged away from the bottom of the steps into the dark basement. His right knee had locked up on him. It happened sometimes, but there was nothing to do about it but schedule yet another cortisone shot, which might...

“Har-rumph,” Winnie sighed loudly, because she knew it annoyed her elder sister, Elaine. “Har-rumph,” Winnie repeated, like a broken windshield wiper. She could punctuate every word withhar-rumphif she felt like it. She could drag out the second syllable in a breathy exhalation. She had lived long enough to do any damn thing she wanted.

Elaine popped up and refilled Winnie’s coffee cup from the thermal carafe. She was so short she had to stand to pour.

“Oh, what do Michael and Keli want with two old women?” Winnie said, without self-pity. She hadn’t yet told her fifty-year-old son...

We were driving, driving Jessica’s car when it ended. No, she had no car then; work-study students were not allowed until their senior year—and we were juniors. It was my car, my parents’ car technically, a brand-new 1979 Ford Thunderbird of the boat-ish late seventies variety. Enough metal so that I could not be hurt.Always keep enough metal between you and them, Michelle,my father warned. But Jessica was driving the car, asked to drive, and she was welcome to, because I didn’t care about possessions, was unable to care, having been given everything I’d ever thought to...