He was on emergency leave when it happened, home in time for his mother to enter hospice, greeted at the airport by volunteers waving little American flags. I was “home for Christmas,” my meager belongings stored in a CubeSmart storage unit while I figured out my next move. Danny had started stealing my stuff to sell for cash hoping I wouldn’t notice, waiting outside the blood bank for it to open in the morning so he could sell plasma after his latest attempt to get clean failed. I’d gotten a …

“Do you want to die?” Sundeep’s brother asks.  I nod.  Devidas whirls the playground spinner before I have time to grip the metal bar and hold on for my life. He races around and attempts to knock us off with sheer velocity. While I rotate like a kaleidoscope, the ground sparkles with broken glass littered below. His brother, Sundeep, falls first. I’m almost thrown from the wheel, but as the only girl in the group, it’s imperative I hold on. At the last minute, I …

In the first dream, Laxmatte, a fisherman who lives in a small cottage on the coast of Finland, removes Maiju, his plain, broad wife, to a red rocky isle in the middle of the Baltic Sea, where they remain for seven months. He pulls pink salmon in spring, herring in summer, white salmon in fall. On days after a good haul, Maiju chops the head off each fish, smokes their wet red bodies on racks, and wraps them in dried seaweed. Every three weeks, the fisherman and his wife bring the dried fish to …

Wife #2 was sweeping the small bedroom when she found the magazine. A woman with long blond hair adorned the cover. A short yellow dress hugged her body, and her teeth were unnaturally white. They were not allowed magazines. Her first instinct was to turn in Wife #3, but then she remembered what He had told them about reacting hastily. Plus #3 was new, young. Maybe she should give her a chance. So instead she closed the door, sat on the bed, and opened the magazine. # At dinner, Wife #2 …

         The three of them were having a dinner party in honor of Sarah’s fiancé leaving her, eight months ago that Monday. It was the first cold night in November, and Max and Tessa wore doubled-up socks inside their apartment. He cooked steaks on the stovetop, in a frying pan, using a fork to turn the big pieces of meat. She tossed potato wedges with cream and cheddar cheese.          “What can I do?” Sarah sat …

Henry’s diary was a soiled jubilation of a recluse’s childhood, stuffed under his iguana’s terrarium, reeking of fierce terror and hands-on scrutiny of grade school intimacy and psychopathy, page by flourished page, inflamed bedlam of erect body odors as purposeful and gusty as the sticky names recorded and blacklisted in backwash gray marker mapping who slithered under-soaped flesh out of station wagons into over-sparkled classrooms cloned with crappy kid’s art and Mom bumper stickers flush …