On illness, lockdown, marriage, and intimacy.

A couple, a caregiver, and a promise.

A fatal overdose, a stunning coincidence, and a mother’s long quest to heal.

Their mom and dad were two of the 33,091 people to die of opioid overdoses in 2015. Now, three children in West Virginia must move forward amid an epidemic.

Memories of an abusive father and a mother's ghost.

"One night, he didn’t come home, and we went to bed without dinner. After you’d fallen asleep, I went to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich. I didn’t make you one. I came back into our room and ate quietly. When our mother’s ghost appeared near the foot of your bed, she startled me: I had never before seen the moment of her appearance, and now I did, the flash of it, quick and bright, like an eye opening. I dropped my sandwich on the floor."

Parents, children, and complications convene at a vacation home; an excerpt from Fierro's debut novel, out this week.

"Michael pulled her into his lap, and she stayed, even though it made her feel small, and these were surely not people who appreciated PDAs. Tiffany had learned quickly that the urban sophisticates admired subtlety over all else. Anything loud, lewd, or lascivious should be filtered through irony or irreverence."

A Tyrannosaurus skeleton observes the tension between a mother and daughter.

"Angela is a lot like her mom, shorter than the length of Tammy’s skull, thin enough that she isn’t appetizing. Tammy is certain that humans would recognize the color of Angela’s hair as peculiar. Truth is, not all of Tammy is real either. Bones in her tail and her torso are made of a blend of plastic and glass because her real ones disintegrated. But to an untrained onlooker, it is impossible to tell. And even though Angela has the advantage of not being nailed to a pedestal, Tammy can’t help but feel a little pride, like Debbie’s daughter is probably more embarrassed about her bizarre appearance than the dinosaur her own rainbows and glitter."

Russian immigrant parents attempt to visit their troubled son in a mental hospital.

"He excludes real people from the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme."

A forgotten birthday cake sets off a chain of unexpected events.

"The door to the bakery is meant to be pulled, but I push hard against it, like a bird hitting the glass. The lady behind the counter settles eyes on me, so I pull myself up as straight as I can and pull the door. On a wooden board above the register a TV is playing The Today Show. Jane Pauley and Madonna won’t shut up about Madonna’s dress like it’s gonna end the Cold War and I have to wonder if I’m the only person in the world living with trouble. Be-hind the glare of the case, I can see the Cinderella cake covered in icy blue frosting thick as a comforter. A glass carriage flies across the surface in needle-thin icing. I put my hand to the glass—forgetting the lady behind the counter—smudging it, until she clears her throat.

On caring for a bipolar parent amidst a broken mental health care system.

Paul Simon’s Graceland at 25.

The Paul Simon who, on a bus en route to New York City told his sleeping girlfriend that he was empty and aching and he didn’t know why, that Simon belongs to our parents. My generation may love him but he’s not ours. The Simon who is soft in the middle (or at least feels an affinity for men who happen to be), however, the one who reminds young women of money, who has been divorced and has a kid to prove it, and who has the means to catch a cab uptown and take it all the way downtown talking dispassionately while doing so about the comings and goings of breakdowns, that Simon belongs to us as much as he does to our folks because he is our folks.

I felt, in some substantive yet elusive way, that I had had a hand in killing my mother. And so the search for a bed became a search for sanctuary, which is to say that the search for a bed became the search for a place; and of course by place I mean space, the sort of approximate, indeterminate space one might refer to when one says to another person, "I need some space"; and the fact that space in this context generally consists of feelings did not prevent me from imagining that the space-considered, against all reason, as a viable location; namely, my bedroom-could be filled, pretty much perfectly, by a luxury queen-size bed draped in gray-and-white-striped, masculine-looking sheets, with maybe a slightly and appropriately feminine ruffled bed skirt stretched about the box spring (all from Bellora in SoHo).