An Hour with the Ogre

We sit at a table in The Glade, a room named for the sappy paintings of pastoral scenes on its walls. Their grasses and trees are carefully balanced and in them nothing lurks or lives.

Leaving Miller’s Farm

The children want to learn from me, but not until they know I’m someone with a knowledge. You’ll see at the assembly the moment they turn receptive, at which point you’ll know you’re getting your money’s worth.

The Gallagher-von-Durfeldoms

We are the family of everyone who means us no harm, whatever the results of what they do. We love Pizza Friday, snow days, and getting into pajamas in the afternoon when we’ve spent the day at the beach.

An Offering

—Nevertheless you did kill him?
—I was present at his death.
—Present with a knife.
—Mine was not the only hand on that knife.

Under the Bed

I had no magic as a child. I would have used it if I had, to stop the Boots from kicking me where I hid. Flat against the bedroom floor with the floor of the sky just inches above my nose, I knew no safer, more anonymous place to be,

Salt Toast

In photos of my daughter’s wedding, I look thinner than I was and not at all as if I wanted to strangle the groom. There stands Sheila, radiant as always against a bank of pallbearer suits.

Separate Trains

They looked married. In what they took for granted, the other riders saw they had been together forever. He read the map of the system posted by the door, tilting his head to follow the lines, and kept his balance with a hand on the pole.

Clarity

The Computative Assistant to the Acting Vice-Director of Apportionment Compliance for the local subdistrict stopped counting. For an hour he did nothing but stare at his screen and its pattern of numbers that veiled the white certainty beyond.

Borrowed Luggage

A simple man named Abraham Kosofsky watched his tiny town of Berezovka grow tinier every day. Fannie, he asked his wife, What will become of us when all our neighbors are carried away by this coughing fit and buried?

Trade Rumors

—Dad, are you trying to trade me?
—What would make you say that?
—Mister Moyer said you offered me for his daughter.
—Not just his daughter, son. That was a package deal.