I like animals and I like men. The big solid chest of a man, a big ruddy man who is not too young, not too clean, who smells a little like saddles and a little like dirt—that’s for me! And there certainly is nothing like a dog. Never, never in my complicated indoor adolescence up north, in the sad girly light of my bedroom, would I have believed such simple solid pleasures could be mine. For years I waited there in the dim, cheap twinkle of my dozens of bottles of cologne and gloss, their good scents slowly turning...

Helene is young, brown-haired, and intelligent, but not necessarily an attractive person. She knows that her expressions change too dramatically; she can’t seem to hold her face still like people on TV, or even most people she meets in real life. She tends to take things personally, like the time she was sunning in her square of a front yard, feeling puffy in her new bikini, and she opened her eyes to the Goodyear blimp, humming serenely overhead. She dresses well, knows how to wear a suit, but she’s also aware of how easy it is to put together a...

Pat Boone—not the Pat Boone but only a graduate student in Agricultural Science—was driving the oysters down to Mulberry to have them irradiated. He was used to being the wrong Pat Boone but was nevertheless miserable, careening down Interstate 75 in the windless predawn, gripping the wheel of the Food Science van with his troubled pink fingers. He thought he might have a fever; he kept sneezing and his freckles kept getting in his eyes like gnats, reflecting off his pale face and blinding him. He whizzed past lit signs and enticements, antic neon red coffee cups with...

The child was scared of everything. She was scared of being left alone but scared of baby-sitters, especially the young ones who wore black eyeliner. The child’s mother owned a tube of black eyeliner which the child could go look at anytime, sitting unassumingly in its basket on the bathroom counter, but the child wasn’t scared of that. She was scared of the violent sound of her own bathwater running. When it was time for her bath, her mother would run the water and she would stay in her room with the door closed until the tub was full. But...

Claire from upstairs had a brother who from the time he was little would go outside and come back in with snakes, snakes nobody even saw until he casually picked them out of the grass and offered them for your view. This was something Claire told me, and after she told me I could not seem to hear or see enough of him. He and Claire were tall, handsome interns at a stable, both of them chattering about bots and mash and foundering hooves, sharing blue jeans so that sometimes when I saw a pair of strong faded legs striding...

I’m not even out of Florida and already thinking of my mother: the sun-bleached billboard for House of Porcelain reminds me of the ceramics she took up after my father died. She called it “mastering an art,” and she did it so that when she looked at me she would not be so distracted by his eyes, his chin; she wanted to make the hard first months easier. She set up shop on our screened porch, replacing my father’s shelves of hardware with ten-pound bags of wet clay and a kiln she assembled from a kit, and soon the porch...

Dallas’s dream was to someday live in an apartment large enough for him and his dearest friends to whip through it on roller skates, screaming, “It’s happening! It’s happening!” at the moment of his triumph, but he was already thirty, lived alone on a waiter’s salary, and had neither triumphs nor dear friends. His last friend had been his nearly silent college roommate, Chune Pei Liu, but Chune had gone to jail one night for uprooting and dragging a small holly tree across campus and then threatening the officers who tried to arrest him with kitchen knives, and he moved...

I said yes to Borden’s proposition because I was vulnerable; I’d just been turned down for a job at the local rodeo as one of the girls in shorts and boots who get the crowd excited by pretending to rescue the clowns from the bull. I was after some color and action, anything but typing, and I already owned a pair of quality boots, but this was an insider’s job—you had to know a cowboy, or at least a clown. Plenty of girls had hand-tooled, snake-trimmed boots like mine, or so the smirking rodeo administrator said. He seemed not...

The guest speaker flies in on the last day of July, and you are there to meet him. You watch the speck of his plane approach from behind the terminal’s glass wall, which boils against the palm of your hand as though an invisible fire rages just outside. The sun is so powerful you can see through your thumb, which looks old, though you are young. The jet taxis hugely in, sending its thrilling, screaming roar up through the carpet. When you’re in your windowless office, only a few miles from here, typing memos for Dr. Mime, you never, ever...

Though I’m an adult, I’m in the neatly kept bedroom of my childhood. Nothing has changed—the yellow plaster walls, the single bed with its orange poly-fill bedspread, the lifeless walnutframed intercom that was built into the wall in the 1950s, before my family moved in. I’ve been away for many years, far from here and alone, building my life as one would a house, warily, feeling the weight of every brick, lifting and placing each one, seeing the shape of the house rise up in the air before it is visible, before it even exists.

Here, though, nothing has...

I said: Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not some pervert—you think I’m like that hockey puck in New Jersey, the mascot who got arrested for grabbing girl’s breasts with his big leather mitt at home games? I’m a polar bear! I molest no one, I give out ice cream cones in the freezer aisle, I make six dollars an hour, I majored in Humanities, I’m a girl.

I was talking to the Winn-Dixie manager in his office. Like every grocery-store manager, he had a pudgy face, small mustache, and worried expression, and he was trying very hard, in his...