Avez-vous trouvé tout ce que vous cherchez? the checker asks.

I murdered the cat on a Tuesday and by Wednesday morning I was back to work, saying nothing to anyone, scanning milk cartons and zucchinis and rolls of toilet paper.

Something bad happened. I sat on the bed. Tammy was under the bed but I didn’t know that. And the mattress is held up by wooden slats but the slats weren’t cut long enough, so they barely hold up the mattress and if you shift your position on the bed, there is a good chance that the slats will move out of place in the frame and the mattress will fall through the frame. And that’s what happened. The bad thing.

When she died, she just wasn’t there. I had to ask about her. She wasn’t in the usual place.

Across the vacant middle seat an old man is sleeping through all of this, chin to collarbone, neck bent at a right angle.

I forget how many jobs I got let go from and how many houses picked me up, sheets and everything, and dumped me around the corner until some other work, some other roof overhead, seemed to gather me up and dropped me hence. 

And any of the people that had been counted correctly, including me, could move or die, making the incorrect count accurate once again, if only for a moment.

I am in a storehouse of answers, am I not? I head for the reference desk even though there's no one behind the counter.

No one comes. I walk up to the bike. The seat’s taller than my bike.

I don’t smoke, I called out, but no one heard me, and I sounded uncertain. 

The grass here is incessant.

A deep hole.

It wasn’t my fault we started talking.

Ess saw it first at 2:03 AM.

Do you remember this one?

It was cloudy most days.

When it is morning morning I dress myself in nice human clothes. I am ready to leave the garden, but I do not leave the garden.

Do us in quick, I begged, do me easy.

Perhaps we are simply trying to figure out how to stay inside a relationship – our relationship – and figure out how to physically exit the space we currently inhabit and enter another. 

I was seventeen, so he was a man — had I been older, maybe not.

Show her face to the camera. Put your finger in her mouth.

Here is your neighbor, blood forking from her nose, catching on her lip. 

He’s soaked in sweat already and all he’s done is drive. He must know what they are here to find.

I always knew I would wash up on an island.

When I was thirty I found my birth mom. I’d written her letters but never sent them.