AB Intra

Space Dog’s story had been popular in the early days of the race to the stars, but even now, when so many other, more aggressive, heroes drew children in, the brave little dog remained a classic. She had never told her daughter the reality of that dog’s fate. Why would you do that to a child? — Kemper

They want something from him, these men, and this is how it will go, one day after another. He’ll watch things that aren’t true and listen to questions that make no sense and it won’t stop until he dies or gives them what they need. — binder

I

n years to come, on the rare occasion when Audrey will find herself alone with the door to her basement of bygones somehow ajar, tatters from this evening formation in center hall will flutter out, encircling her, and she’ll do nothing, as she’s always done, holding as still as possible, declining to tally the impact of that night on her inadequate present. — robertson

T

he different voices frightened him. The woman across from him walked down the train car, and Jon realized that he was thinking out loud. Should he apologize? That would just make him seem crazier. He swore that he would never get out of control like that again. — bills-solomon

M

ercifully, Ariadne would not look at me. She was an aloof, benevolent presence. Wise. Healing. A friend. Together we shared our solitude, I rested, and slowly a measure of sense returned. — hollwig

T

he scene called for a tire swing, gainers, a drown scare or two: some vision of summer that’d eluded us in a land-locked state, a dried-out state whose nowhereness we took as a personal rebuke, or else a challenge. Always we were waiting, searching: for calamity, crisis, a swell of history — or something. — parnegg

D

id Sweetheart explain to the woman that she was free to eat her bagels anywhere? Was Sweetheart aware of the cameras, the surveillance? Did she know that, though disability is a protected class, general ugliness isn’t considered to be? — zucker

T

hey shared motel rooms, sneered at continental breakfasts, snuck wine to hot tubs, gigglingly flirted with salesmen, dared each other to buy cute guys a drink, and after each trip they returned to school feeling bigger, that the place and the people within it were all somehow smaller. — Bernard

A

nd you wash your car and go to the movies. And read books and talk at the water cooler in the office about current events and politics and the rest of it, the whole mad mess. And drop God and pick him up again like an old friend. — gutierrez

M

onica is only trying to help neighbors be a little saner, so she lowers by ten degrees each house and leaves it at that. Sometimes only five degrees if the initial setting is in the range of the sensible! Again, she is not cruel, just recalibrating comforts. — walthausen

A

t first he prayed to make them happy — he barely believed anymore, but they did. Then he prayed to see if he could believe in God again. He prayed because what else? — guista

T

he phone call was to confirm my appointment the next day, and weekly thereafter, with an eighty-seven-year-old widower named Walt Laramie. This surprised me. I hate to out myself as a person likelier to criticize a worthy cause’s acronym than to volunteer for it, but I hadn’t signed up to visit anyone. — gannon

H

e wanted a word for how he felt, but could recall not even a single one from his dream. He could imagine he saw letters in his mind, and could remember how confident he’d felt, how happy, but no words came together, or, because he suspected they were in some way submerged, surfaced. — amdahl