Lorrine’s house in mid-summer. Kitchen full of plastic bags filled with bleached towels, dampening. The hiss of the iron. The outside softened through the gray grid of screens. Her husband’s father lying in the yard in a hammock drinking gin and tonics, an old salt feeling in the gentle rocking the roll of the ocean, surrounded by the blue air, a yellow glass beading on a wrought-iron table, arbors of purple clematis and a hedge of white hydrangeas. The town itself surrounded by green rippling corn, by sloping rolls of hay like praying horses.

“Lorrine, more gin.” She puts down...

The wife of a pianist with hair to her waist leans too close to a candle and for an instant the spray of hair burns and glows like hot wires, filaments in glass. The pianist is sitting in the corner by another candle, in conversation with an androgynous cornet player who feels that she is in some way carrying on a secret though spiritual affair with the pianist right under his wife’s eyes, because they are of course talking on a much higher plane than the pianist could ever hope to reach with his wife, who is much too pretty...

Summer, and the sidewalk cracks are lush with weeds; the concrete buckles. Last year’s crop of high school pom-pom girls push strollers with new babies over the waves of sidewalk, the wheels catching. A factory that makes car seat cushions sends out clouds of white fallout, coating flowers. A half acre of old tires catches fire and smoulders.

Mrs. D. watches through her screen. She knows the names of the girls’ grandparents, remembers the factory strikes when executive wives kept guns in their cars next to their children. She was born in the corner house defined by the sidewalks, was...

At all moments I expect you. There are of course logistical problems. I know that you are hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away, that you are not even sure where I am, but I decide that you are on the road and passing my exit on the interstate at all moments of the day. I imagine your call from the highway, calculate the time it would take you to get to my house from the directions I give, if I could get my face washed, clothes changed if necessary into something that looks less like I’ve been waiting for you,...

Alma sits alone at the table, watching her family line up for food. She will go last when the line is shorter. A daughter complains to her husband that every Oktoberfest banquest is the same, that it takes weeks to rid her clothes of the sour odor of kraut. The husband laughs, squeezes the daughter, and whispers something, Alma’s sure, about humoring the old woman. Eat the sweet sausage, he’s saying, buy the children cloth toys stuffed with some old lady’s hose, cast-off shoes covered with macaroni sprayed gold. Alma says nothing, knows they care for her really, these older...

All that Illinois winter she’d been afraid of a coming ice age and now here they were where the last one hadn’t touched, where dinosaurs had fled and shrunk in the comfort, the ease of the life, to ruby-throated lizards which skittered across sidewalks, where prehistoric birds dove at the water for fish and plants looked like ancient and protective clusters of swords. She sits here now, in a fresh early-morning restaurant behind a glass wall looking out on the Gulf, on a small peninsula so she can watch the sun rising higher on the water as if she is...

He told me that his ancestor had left his hard black seeds in neat rows where scrub pine or thistle, cockle or thorns would have grown and that when people stopped just long enough to eat the apples he had planted they felt their feet become like iron and their heads become drugged and when they tried to move, found that they, like the trees, couldn’t. And in turn, he said, the people planted squash and corn and ate the apples freely, spreading more black seeds whose roots joined under the earth in dark rivers which spread under the houses...

For the first time she was aware, though only slightly in the moments when she was still, of a warmth or a rumbling of something happening in a part of her body she’d always thought was her stomach. A part of her stomach, though, that had always been dormant, made no demands of hunger before dinner or pain after, was a hibernating animal stretching, waking, pushing to pull her attention away from a stuffed duck and a red scooter in the same way that once her legs, her arms, her fingers and teeth, when acknowledged, had drawn her from her...

We share some of the same relatives and, if diagrammed, they would hold us together like hinges or bonds drawn in geometric shapes between hydrogen, say, and oxygen in water, or any other elements that fuse. But it’s a tenuous fusion; there are many other relatives that we don’t share, and if one of these other relatives draws a family tree I am not included, unfastened and set to drift because I am related only in that my mother is sister to their father and my blood does not flow directly to the treasure we all hope to find, hidden...

I live in a town slowly turning into dust. Choked, finally, by the fields which surround it and by a larger town a few miles west which kept growing like a fat old man adding chocolate to chocolate who, one night in bed, rolled over and gently, quietly crushed his wife. The dust is from the houses rotting, the streets unpaved and rotting, pollen thick as fog, grain elevators pouring out the slick sweet dust of rotting corn until that time in the fall when the fields become white and brittle as bleached bones and the corn is cut close...