She walked as if she were afraid that putting one foot down on the floor too hard would make the boards crack.

“Wait till I turn this off. Now.”

“That noise. Whatever is it?”

“The Hoover was running.”

“How’s that?”

“I said, I was running the vacuum.”

“Not that. Outside. Listen.” Rosie leaned over the banister.

“Oh, it’s the bee, dear.”

“Bee nothing. A thousand woodpeckers working on tin.”

Selim the half-wit hoarded everything—that was the story they told me my first day in waste management. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he took up hoarding as a way to fill the void. It started out with stuff his wife might have liked—small earrings, a tea set, owl statuettes—picked out of garbage bins. Well, Selim ended up with a house packed to the rafters with trash he thought was gold. He tucked it onto shelves and into stacks, put it in cupboards, crammed it under floorboards, couch cushions, and the mattress, until there was no space left but overhead.

The last time we had sex, it was cold out and they said a storm was coming. My wife was shivering in fear, making a list to steady herself. For a while I was trying to cross things off—candles, eight gallons of water, move things away from windows. 

Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which didn’t take more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara—they called her Babs—slid under the chain-link and waddled down to the water.

After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it.

Sunday and the beautiful and sleek and unsmiling and too good for us Mavala Shikongo is gone. Second to last single woman teacher at an all boy's boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons 

For hours we listened to it on the radio, and not once did Larry Phoebus say a word. A woman walked into a classroom of a school a couple of towns over and started shooting. She killed an eight-year-old boy and ­wounded five ­other kids.

When had she begun to suspect that her second-floor tenant, Mr. Han, was building a bomb? The idea had come to her slowly, the way she’d ­intuited her husband’s illness in its early days, ­before the lapses and the wandering and the loss of language made it clear to everyone. 

On Wednesdays wear a skirt. A skirt is better for dancing. After school, remember not to take the bus. Go to McDonald's instead. Order the fries. Don't even bother trying to sit with Patricia and Cara. Instead, try to sit with Sasha and Toni Sue.