I got a job working in the orphan hospital. Mothers were all I thought about then. What mothers did, what you did if you didn’t have one. Babies there never cried, not even the sickest of them, and that was not good, I thought. They did not cry because they got, somehow they got, that if they did, no one would comfort them. And I thought—I don’t know why—someone should teach them about comfort. So the other nurses and I wrapped some clocks in blanket scraps. Each crib got a bundled clock. To mimic a heart. Like you...

The shepherdess held her head low as she asked me for paper. I have come down the mountain, she said, and her voice was not caught on the store’s security tape. Her movements, her heavy garments were not caught by the electric eye. It was late, the store was closing, but she did not know how to read these signs. No moon that night. That week, per the almanac, nothing but cloudy and raining. It was the sort of hot night when the city had blackouts, the kind of electric weather the almanacs would eventually predict. No paper, but reams...

Subject: “do you know chelsa????”

This is for all you hobos who live in abandoned castles—if you ever go online at the public library, please read this—my sister is missing. Social Security says she doesn’t exist, but she did. Missing Persons says she may have burned in a fire on a harbor estate, but no body was ever found. Someone has to stay home to comb through the family ruin and that’s me and my ruin is Chelsa, missing twenty-two years, last seen in jeans and jelly shoes holding a stuffed dog, liked playing ring around the rosy...