Encounters and interactions with a semi-famous star.

The stark realities of nature and nuture.

When the author’s wife was dying, his best friend moved in.

“As an added bonus, she paid for everything.”

Two friends wait out a storm in Waffle House on their way to uncertainty.

Two girls connected by friendship and strange magic.

Illness, family, and the weight of history.

Two friends reside in the home of a deceased writer.

A story of maps, travels, and (un)couplings.

Memories and violence resurface at a high school reunion.

The reappearance of an adult woman's imaginary friend from childhood.

Scenes from a crumbling marriage, a friendship, a life in the painful present.

A backyard wrestling match; an examination of different young lives.

A mysterious stone and the complexities of grief.

A man's friendships with various women reveal psychological and philosophical complexities.

College friends come together during a power failure and the onset of an ill-fated relationship.

“None of this should have ever happened. It makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s truly crazy.”

A story of disintegrated relationships and the odd things left behind.

"Tabitha positioned the big horn sheep in the front yard and I drank a third mimosa. On Sundays, we got together and searched for any random thing to do, but always ended up back at her place. A neighbor, watering bushes, watched as Tabitha dragged the sheep around the yard, trying to find the right place."

A story of disintegrated relationships and the odd things left behind.

"Tabitha positioned the big horn sheep in the front yard and I drank a third mimosa. On Sundays, we got together and searched for any random thing to do, but always ended up back at her place. A neighbor, watering bushes, watched as Tabitha dragged the sheep around the yard, trying to find the right place."

Two classmates/Boy Scouts forge an uneasy, unspoken bond.

"I was aware that something in him seemed broken, he seemed to retreat, shrink, gradually something had turned in him. A chemical transformation, or imbalance. I felt a kinship in his pain, two notes struck in harmony. I wouldn’t realize how wrong I was until later, how I’d mislocated the ache. I thought I’d made this come to fruition, a product of my will."

A model's struggle with perception and the world around her.

"Abby smiled. She said, 'If something is old, it is classic. If it is classic, you have class. If you have class, you feel beautiful. If you feel beautiful, you feel young. Something old makes you feel young.'"

An artist mistakes years of friendship for lust, culminating in an assault.

"He has never felt such urgency. Everything is in his way, her jacket, her sweater, the lace bra he imagines she bought for him. He feels the skin of her bare waist, from under the skirt, her thigh. The night has made her skin cool. Her hair snags on the wall. An earring clinks through a sidewalk grate. She turns to avoid his open mouth. Her cheek drags against coarse brick. His eyes are open."

Middle school and family unease; a mysterious neurological condition.

"I knew something bad was about to happen right before it did. My face heated. All the sound cut out, like a huge furry helmet had been dropped over my skull. The room, it didn’t look right. I’m trying to think how to explain it, but all I can come up with is that the colors separated, kind of fizzed around—the green and red marks on the dry-erase board hovered like insects, the purple of Mr. Franz’s tie pixilated. I had that greasy swirl in my stomach like when you’re about to fart and are still praying there’s a way it will be silent, like when you go to the bathroom after a science lab of intolerable closeness to your intolerably cute lab partner and see that yes, the tingle on your nose was actually a tumor-sized whitehead erupting."

A day in the life of a child in 1960s England.

"Carrie’s father was studying, in the evenings and on weekends, for a degree in politics, but on the day of a party he had to leave his books and submit to the different laws of the female domain, obeying the instructions that his wife rapped out, vacuuming and tidying, setting up the drinks tray. She followed impatiently after him, because he had no feeling for arranging the cushions or the flowers; he thought these things were not worth having a feeling for. The children exchanged sly looks and jokes with their father behind their mother’s back, conspiring against her remorselessness. But as soon as the guests arrived she relaxed into smiles, as if that other, sterner self had never existed."

Somber, tender scenes from a local bar.

"It was supposed to be an intervention, but they were getting piss drunk. Freddy Malins had been drinking all week. His mother died the morning after New Year’s at her home in Portobello. She was taking out the trash and fell down the steps in the hall that led to the street. There was another tenant, but they were stuck in Kildare due to the snow storm that covered the country, and, after Freddy came around to ring for her and she wouldn’t answer, he went back home, cursing at his mother for being a right bloody pain in the ass, and got his copy of the key to her house. When he opened the door he found her there, eyes closed, neck craned at a sharp angle, head pressed forward against her chest."