This is the beginning. Here is where the story begins. The character is introduced—we meet the character, her, we’ll call her a her.

The month after our mother died, our father began bringing women home. It felt like a behind-her-back kind of operation. “I’m going to have a guest over tonight,” is what he would say. 

David and I stayed out in the living room, turned up cartoons, burned toast, kicked our feet up over our heads. I worked long division. At some point a woman would emerge to drink a glass of water or fix her hair in the kitchen window’s dark reflection.

The guests left behind nubs of lipstick in gold tubes and leftover food, paper pouches of cold french fries, chicken legs in clamshell Styrofoam boxes. They left tampons blooming through toilet paper in the trash can, like tiny mice they’d killed, the cotton tails pink with blood.

Mary believed there were two kinds of people in the world. There were those who were seen and those who were not. Mary considered herself the latter. 

“The center, the center.” “Zontle?” “The middle of town. Put it that way.” “Ah, meetzle! ” he recognized, somewhat chuffed, and then sighted his nose down the street in the direction of the Rynek

On day fifty-one, a person on the radio said, For many Americans, this is the defining crisis of our lives, but all I had done that day was eat sugared mango slices and write a list.

Our world is the Mesopotamian Plain. We have one city, called the City, which is located almost exactly in the center of the plain. Half of us live in the City, the other half on farms in the countryside. As far as we know, we natives of the plain are the only humans on the face of the earth.

Didi Kinkaid and her three children by three fathers lived in a narrow pink and green trailer at the end of a rutted road in Paradise Hollow.

Dora’s disappeared again. I see her lying in the field, in the abandoned refrigerator. She’s not sleeping and she’s not dead: she’s between these places. And though I’m afraid for her even now, from this distance of years I can tell you Dora Stone is going to live.

Failure is the story, but the story itself is also failure.

In the mornings Alexei Petrovich’s Mama yawns loud and long: hurrah, onward, a new morning gushes in through the window; the cactuses shine, the curtains quiver; the gates of the nighttime realm