Three times a year, the National Public Radio show Weekends on All Things Considered holds a fiction contest in which listeners from across the country submit stories that can be read aloud in less than three minutes.

Thomas has said nothing the entire session. He leans back in the metal folding chair that he prefers. A year ago, for Thomas’s first appointment, Dr. Lena Novak borrowed the chair from a colleague and family friend, Jim Merrill, whose office was down the hall. 

The Verbal Metrics Department filled a single corridor of Building M, a squat Bauhaus knockoff with one glass face that presided over the northwest corner of 275 acres of former farmland that everyone at the Scholastic Achievement Service referred to as a “campus.” 

I snapped my leg in two and lost the summer—six months on crutches and I’d be lucky if I didn’t limp for the rest of my life. I went to the ground for a slide tackle in a pickup soccer game and felt what turned out to be my tibia shoot through my skin. 

We called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poem with her friends.

On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients’ theories of light, how it streams at angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water.

Three times a year, the National Public Radio show Weekends on All Things Considered holds a fiction contest in which listeners from across the country submit ­stories that can be read aloud in less than three minutes.

In the afternoon, the dog trainer, Anna, arrived to work on “leave it” and “drop it” and review what they’d learned about biting. She left a yellow slicker and a pair of pink boots in the hall. Her clothes were dry.

I had been down south before, but my mother and I had driven on I-5, not the back roads. My mother would never have stopped at the rock shop, where Bobby let us each buy a piece of agate, or the date farm, where an old man made the three of us milkshakes. 

If we hadn’t stopped on our way to the ceremony to look at the pen of black pigs, we wouldn’t have seen the very large pig lunge at the smaller one, to force him away from the feeding trough.