Nights at the store, the brother and sister bagged the groceries that tumbled down the conveyors, rarely looking up, a simple nod of the head at a thanks from a customer. The girl, Merrill, was fifteen and tall for her age. The brother, Nate, was sixteen and trying to grow a moustache. He often wore a green knit hat. They didn’t talk much with the cashiers or the manager. A yes sir, no ma’am here and there. When the store was slow, they brought in the carts, held contests between each other: who could bring in the most. Other times,...

Shelby woke before sunrise, dressed in her warmest clothes in the dark. In the kitchen, she packed her book bag with apples and bread, some peanut butter. She added a map of Seattle, a carton of cigarettes she’d hidden at the top of a cabinet, and then brewed some coffee on the stove. She walked barefoot in the trailer so as not to wake her sister and the boyfriend. It was still dark outside by the time she poured the coffee into her thermos, and out through the window she could see the dull yellow glow of a streetlamp at...

I went down to the basement in late evening because of a strange, familiar shiver that frightened me. There was water down there, shin deep, and it was filled with silt and sand. My brother Albert and I had been trying to pump it out. I opened the gun cabinet and checked for his pistols, and sure enough there was one of them missing. I’d been worrying about him for a while. I’d felt something similar years before, and another feeling had set me to motion. Out from school and into home, and when I got there Ma was under...

A boxer’s offense is designed to create openings in the opponent’s defense and to land blows to the vulnerable points of the head and body from the waist up. Power originates as she pushes off from her feet; its degree depends upon her ability to link the muscles of the legs, the back, the shoulders, and the arms into a chain of force. A boxer’s attack consists of such basic blows as left jab, right cross, left hook, and uppercut.

Helen, fifteen, throws a hook from her left foot, covers her midsection, ducks, takes a hit on her padded headgear,...

It was a visiting priest, as it often was, and the two altar boys half-listened to the homily and stared out at the small congregation. Snow was falling fast outside, and many of the old people had stayed home, but there was one man—more ancient than any they’d seen—sitting in the back of the church, and he was obviously a homeless man and a little drunk tonight. At least it seemed this way to Omar, the older of the two altar boys, and he watched the man close his eyes and lean forward, almost asleep, then catch himself...

Laika stands on her hands, watches a young elephant and its trainer, upside down, make their way slowly across the tent grounds. The elephant’s trunk keeps tickling the armpit of the trainer, and the trainer swats it away, taps the straw at the ground with his short pole. The damp air smells of straw and the sweat of the circus performers. Some sour candy, baking somewhere. A tired donkey—painted in red and white stripes—is tied to a fencepost, and it watches Laika with lazy eyes, as if it is asleep and observing a dream.

A child, years younger...

It was the day after my fourteenth birthday, and I’d been looking out the window of the bus for most of Tennessee and into the Appalachians, watching the fog rise from the shoulder of the road and the patchwork of barns and homes near the state highway. A pale, spotted horse here, a brown dog lying on its side there, a group of young girls, about my age, dancing to music from a tape player set on the hood of a car. When we pulled into the station I spotted my Uncle Jake—dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans...

Grimsley kept a flower stem in his pocket, not so much for good luck, but to keep bad luck away, a trick his mother had taught him. In the summertime, he never wore a hat after dark. Of these things, he was sure. An apple or a tomato without a bruise was bad luck, as was reading the obituaries, unless you knew someone in there. Bats brought good luck, but you didn’t want too many of them. A candle reflected in glass was a good sign, but its reflection in a mirror was, if possible, to be avoided. He never...

Nate and Merrill fussed about in the kitchen. The boy was seventeen, the girl almost sixteen, and their father sat at the kitchen table repairing a clock that a neighbor had brought to him. He was almost seventy, the father, and had long been deaf. His heart was weak now, and he was no longer able to work as a fisherman, as he had for the whole of his life. There were filets of cobia baking in the oven, and asparagus and corn frying on the stove. The boy concentrated on assembling a salad: they’d been heavy on the vegetables...