I make my coffee in the dark in order to prolong the delicious weight of sleep. The sun will rise soon but for now a thin tangerine light glows above Flat Top, where pitched roofs jut from the skyline and the radio tower blinks with red devil’s eyes. Yesterday’s flowers, the first of late winter, have already dropped yellow and purple petals on the sideboard. I move slowly to keep my dreams alive in my brain. An email, there’s always a dream email, with instructions I don’t understand. An …

It was the pants that caught my eye on the way to meet an old friend. Suspended in the boutique window, the fine wool drape's exquisite softness was meant to draw the attention of a certain type of man. I knew a man of this sort, though I hadn’t thought of him since college. I saw him there, a ghost through the window, his pale hands. How carefully he’d drape the pants over the back of the chair. How much he valued these things, his clothes, from the attention, the honor, really, that he paid …

I heard Sistah gifted Woama a size XXL tee, graphic anime printed like a schoolgirl’s, and a bunch of undergarments, white as chalk and milk, ones she bought at a Clearance Sale, unboxed them, unrolled them with care, and when she spread them on the floor with an unmistakable flourish, because she’d brought them all the way from New Jersey, Woama pushed an inky-blue melamine tray with deep fried fritters towards Sistah’s husband to please him, extract a grin, and started pouring chubitchi into a …

The neighbors two doors down are aliens. From space. We pretend not to know. They arrive at our door with bottle-green skin, their eyebrows small flitting tentacles, and their child, the individual we’ve always presumed to be their child, gripping their impossibly smooth three-fingered hands. The wife, we think, carries the trick-or-treat bag. “We buried our landing craft in the hills southwest of town,” the husband tells us. “Ha ha. This is only a joke I make. Trick and treat.” “It is not …

It did not bother Claire so much when the dying pigeon lay still, in the middle of the sidewalk, panting, wide‑open eyes darting here and there. She could reckon with it then, keep its agony in place. There was something close to dignity about the bird—as though it could be believed that it had come to a place of acceptance of its fate. That it was doing its utmost to die a dignified, stoic death. Two other women, random pedestrians, had stopped alongside Claire to stare down at the injured …

Dad’s beat-up white Renault sat at the far end of our little cul-de-sac, one front wheel up on the pavement and the rear end stuck out miles from the curb. Back from work early meant he’d already have a glass of whiskey in one hand, remote control in the other, staring at some quiz show on the telly. Instead, I found him in the lounge—perhaps already two-sheets to the wind—on his hands and knees, pulling irritably at a knot of flashing Christmas tree lights Mum had bought in the sales last …