Despite her general disinterest in the sport, Ava was seized by a desperate urge to be a baseball mom. She wasn’t certain that the phrase meant much in the cultural imagination, not in the way that “soccer mom” conjured a woman at the helm of a minivan, the bearer of halftime orange slices for shin guard-clad children. Those children frightened her: their too-big teeth ripping flesh from spongy rinds, their too-small hands tossing the spent peels to the grass for the soccer moms to gather.  But “baseball mom” sat in her mind like a blank thing, nearly devoid of associations.…

I’m standing on the shore with a burnt smoke in one hand and a beer in the other, and John’s talking but I can barely hear him over the roar of the fire. I think he says he’s leaving, but when I look at him, he’s still there and it’s not what he said at all. He said something different and he’s staring at me, waiting.  “What?” I say. He looks nervous and jumpy.  “You heard me.”  I try to pretend that I did, or that I care, but it’s a lost cause from the start, so I stand there.…

He runs. He’s made the mistake of walking alone near the junkyard, after sunset, and come upon the dogs. Usually, a deftly thrown rock or self-assured shout will discourage them, but this time the lateness of the day lends desperation to their enterprise. Or perhaps, like the bigger boys who tormented him, these predators sense he’s weaker, and easier game. Two things, he knows, will save him: his speed and his awareness that they tend to tire—and lose interest—almost immediately. The solidarity of the pack was not sufficient; they were, he understands, at heart craven and without will.   (Always,…

The day Paula arrived in Brooklyn, a Sunday in late August, the rain came down in gray arrows that covered the windows of the livery cab that she rode in like a cloth. Paula could only make out the shapes of buildings, like dark teeth in a fog. It rained for the entire week, and she didn’t leave her room at the top of the stairs in the brownstone where she stayed with her aunt, Lorna. On Friday, when the rain stopped, Paula looked through the window at the world to which she was exiled until her belly, which still…

My walker catches on the splintered plank floors of the front porch. I push hard and plop into the wicker chair, flattening the cushion Ruthie sewed thirty years ago, sun-faded and fraying. White paint is now grey, and the porch overhang is peeling in strips, brown wood showing through. I am an old man in an old house. A big birthday party at my daughter Sharon’s in the valley this afternoon. She circled the date on the kitchen calendar. What’s there to celebrate? A more sensible person would be dead already.  Bird chirps are drowned out by the constant whoosh…

Lily’s hands were curiously marked by the calamity of being Cuban. This wasn’t such a far-fetched notion, she reasoned, for she believed in stories of magical realism, in ghosts and spirits, in self-healing, in the goodness of people, in love after death. That her hands were acting in perfect harmony with her Cuba’s current tragedies was an easy matter of faith and imagination, both of which she had in abundance. Her first clue upon awakening was the pain of instant needles stabbing the palm of her right hand. At first, she thought it was the numbing of a hand asleep,…