Powell sat on a bench beneath a linden at Cişmigiu Park watching an old man having a sponge bath in the artificial lake. Bucharest. How clean could the water be?

Translated from the French by Matthew Brauer.

For a long time, family seemed to me to be a vast territory.

This is the first line that I ever spoke on stage. I have been working on this monologue—and preparing myself to deliver it—for a long time. The memory zone is lit up. Silence.

Most nights, the monster movie memorabilia collector reads stories to Kong and the other creatures, as though ushering them to sleep. Not that they can tell night from day in the collector’s basement; there are no windows to let in the sun’s rays.

I know how to tell you this now.

The day I went back to Philly was not a real day. It was Feb 29th, and if I’d taken my road trip one year earlier or later, the time would not have existed. This—plus the unchanging drizzle, and the giant sorrowful face of Edgar Allan Poe painted on the side of a building—gave the day its other-worldly feel.

His mother was a selkie, but he did not know that yet, not for sure. All he knew, on the day that he watched her walk into the water and sink underneath it, as if the water itself were a force that could pull her like gravity, was that she was his mother.

In her dreams Becky Mandlebraun saw swimming pools. Most recently, there was the skinny four-lane pool her childhood swim team had practiced in, and after that, like the next bead on a chain, came a dream of the roomier eight-lane pool they eventually moved into.

The recreational vehicles came over the roads and into the desert, raising dust straight down the country as the crow flies—tent campers, travel trailers, toy haulers, fifth wheels, and motor homes. The men and women at the wheels, old-timers in seersucker trousers or khaki shorts, in their mouths dentures, cavities, and rot, and in their toiletry kits a diminishing stash of off-brand meds, orange bottles with white caps issuing a desperate, near-empty rattle.

The invitation arrived in the mail:

Dear M,

You are cordially invited to a reception being held in your honor on Tuesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM. Please RSVP by the end of today.

Yours Truly,

The People You’ve Wronged

First rule of the ballpark, at least for the girls like me—we don’t sit with the fans. They crowd the bleachers behind home plate all the way up to the announcer’s box. They lean along the baseline fences, fingers tightened in the chain links.

This was the summer my mother worried about me. I was fifteen, planning a visit to Catalina Island, where my father lived. Lately, I only saw him a few times a year, and when I did, he always came to the mainland, to Long Beach; I’d never been to his new house.