Oklahoma was where it all went wrong. Alex steered the juddering van to the shoulder, and, with his dog Munson howling along in the seat beside him, he cursed ­everything.

The quality of life Task Force: four sweatshirts in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run; their mantra: dope, guns, overtime; their motto: everyone’s got something to lose.

At thirty-three—having misspent his twenties dithering and drinking too much—Paul Wakeling was proud of how far he’d come. He was married, a new father, three years sober, and had recently gotten hired on as an adjunct at the Big Local University.

My father’s last aunt moved in with us when I was ten and she was a thousand. Eighty-three, to be truthful, and virgin pure but sadly broke down. She’d lived near us, in her family home, all her life and

Up and down the dull coastline of her desk, Amerylys ticked her fingernails, Minnie Mouse airbrushed onto each bismuth pink shield.

We pick here because death is life’s ornament, because the place is masculine without the compromising presence of a male. It is a fortress, really, and in it we play as children, infected, set subtly adrift in our Father’s body.

Frances Waythorn, her face ghastly as a mime’s from a souring paste of yogurt, scrubs walls and wainscotting, praying for bleach, polish, order, something, to check her daughter’s latest slide from innocence.

On April 16, 1981, at approximately three P.M., little Peter Möhlendorf, whom everyone called der schwarze Peter, “black Peter,” went home from the village school. His house was on the eastern edge of 

Twice this summer rabid raccoons have crawled down people’s chimneys and in both cases bit old women, in both cases on the face. This is the reason that A. has brought her cat, B., to the veterinarian.

Buddy Millar was the kind of driver who avoided traveling on a main road with other cars. This distaste for sharing the highway often took him rough-wheeling across the prairie or into a labyrinth