The research assistant held in her lap a cigar box. She said they were studying tickles. Of course we were suspicious. The ad in the paper had said nothing about tickles; the ad had said the purpose of the experiment was to “fine-tune the human sensory apparatus and challenge widely accepted notions of the real.” Fifty bucks for a one-hour session. We had thought, Sweet . We had practically skipped all the way to the university. I said dinner tonight was on me. But now we wer

The helicoptering seeds that fell from the trees were slicing people up real good. Real  good. That was our first clue. There would be many more clues to come, but as far as clues go, that first one was a doozy. The messages written on the leaves, spelled out in faint branching vesicles, were almost unnecessary, redundant, superfluous. WE’RE GONNA SLICE YOU ALL UP REAL GOOD, one of them read. Well, yeah. Message already received, you mighty, murderous oak or elm or maple. I p

I had a dream that something big would happen after Frederick, though I knew not what. I know, I know: the formality of the phrase I knew not what  might make it seem as though I wasn’t juggling at the time, but I was. I was juggling. Check this shit out, I said, to each person who entered the rumpus room. Simon, Alice, Moonshot, Fennel Seed, Dougie. They all came in, one b’one. I was juggling eggs. I’d hard-boiled them, which is a form of cheating in juggling circles. Hard-b

Evelyn tasted one of my biscuits. Delicious, she said. Buttery. Flaky. Just flat-out wonderful. Evelyn was one of the judges on the cooking show I was currently competing on. It wasn’t one of the big cooking shows. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones with the famous faces from the culinary world and impressive production values. The show I was on was called “This Is Not a Cooking Competition Show,” but it was a cooking competition show. It was exactly that. I once

When she was young and lithe, she often mixed them up. But now, confined to a bed in a nursing home near Chicago, she recalls them with crystal clarity. Stalagmites are the ones that extend up. Stalactites are the ones that hang down. Caves have a smell. They leave a taste on the tongue. They prickle the skin, that cool dank air. The scream of bats and skitter of rats. Has she jumped or a chasm or two? Or two thousand? Oh god yes, she has. In her mind’s eye, she can see herse