The Anaa’ji begins at dawn. Pink streaks fragment the sky and the fat red sun is swallowed, then spit out by marshmallow clouds, so that every face in the ceremony is only half-illuminated. Light, shadow. Evil, purity. Evil has swarmed this small Navajo town, and the ritual is a cleansing. The rhythmic chants, rising in volume and passion, wake Mary, who has overslept and curses her inadequate al...

In those days there was a third man who walked the roads in sunlight and storms. He wasn’t the hero or the villain. He was something else—pliable, glassy-eyed, unpredictable. He pursued the other two men. They had horses and a head start, so he jogged as fast as he could, instinctively, like a bee spiraling into a waiting flower. But no matter how he strained his protesting muscles, the others r...

In the center of the shop, surrounded by burnt out candles, lay the body of another victim. Jess tiptoed around it, careful, like a nervous mouse slinking through shadows. She waited patiently for the surge of happy adrenaline a dead face always bestowed. When it came she surfed it like a roaring wave. She grinned, even danced a little. She dipped her finger in the woman’s blood, which was cold a...

Betsy trails behind Austin, who follows Jen, who studies the slender rectangle of Amanda’s back as it winds through scrubby bushes. Ahead, Lake Michigan hurls itself against the beach. The four friends shuffle through prickly grass, kick aside pebbles and beer bottles, until cold sand rises between their bare toes. Betsy giggles at a spindly, self-important crab that scuttles along the edge of the...

Afternoons Jenny twists herself through her physical therapy exercises while Jack gets drunk on homemade moonshine. He drifts through the dingy house, grabbing their tired furniture for balance, singing old Fleetwood Mac songs and telling Jenny how beautiful she is. She’s always touched, even though she knows it’s the liquor slithering through his bloodstream, turning him happy but also a little m...

Ginnie Simpson’s mother is throwing a cocktail party. Guests in shimmery dresses, immaculate tuxedos laugh, shout, drift in and out of patches of moonlight on the darkened lawn. Cologne overpowers the scents of grass and soil. Ginnie, twelve but more like twenty-two, makes sure no one’s watching, then scrabbles in the dirt to uncover a burrow containing a flask of whiskey, half a pack of menthol c...

In the hissing blinding whiteness two scientists, a bearded man and a woman with fierce, hungry eyes, struggle up the mountain. They are bound together by a rope tied around their waists and carry bulky packs. They speak in sign language because the blizzard drowns out voices, screams in their ears with an oddly human rage. Occasionally they pass the stiffened bodies of those who came before. Clad...

My father and I sit on the porch drinking homemade whiskey, watching the hazy red sky swallow the sun until twilight gathers and thickens and stars scatter across the blackness like a careless child’s toys. The moon is fat, heavy and mosquitoes feast on our flesh. My mother is dying in a cold hospital ten miles east, stuffed with tubes, her face no longer hers but a jumble of mismatched fragments....

The suitcase twists, spills onto the dirty carpet. She’s packed too much but she thought that in the blank future that stretches before her she might need even the broken, unnecessary things. Empty shampoo bottles, books read hundreds of times. Flight 345 to Denver, boarding, intones a voice. All London passengers check in at E-37. Also if she left anything behind, he’d come back, smash what he co...

Counting stars on cold fingers, marveling at how brightness fragments dark, they don’t expect sleep to take them so quickly. But the grass is soft and unconsciousness is dense, overpowering. Perhaps it was the vodka, or the joint, passed from his fingers to hers and back again. In sleep they forget to touch each other. Amanda dreams of a woman wreathed in roses. She laughs a strange cacophony and ...