I heard Sistah gifted Woama a size XXL tee, graphic anime printed like a schoolgirl’s, and a bunch of undergarments, white as chalk and milk, ones she bought at a Clearance Sale, unboxed them, unrolled them with care, and when she spread them on the floor with an unmistakable flourish, because she’d brought them all the way from New Jersey, Woama pushed an inky-blue melamine tray with deep fried fritters towards Sistah’s husband to please him, extract a grin, and started pouring chubitchi into a …

The neighbors two doors down are aliens. From space. We pretend not to know. They arrive at our door with bottle-green skin, their eyebrows small flitting tentacles, and their child, the individual we’ve always presumed to be their child, gripping their impossibly smooth three-fingered hands. The wife, we think, carries the trick-or-treat bag. “We buried our landing craft in the hills southwest of town,” the husband tells us. “Ha ha. This is only a joke I make. Trick and treat.” “It is not …

It did not bother Claire so much when the dying pigeon lay still, in the middle of the sidewalk, panting, wide‑open eyes darting here and there. She could reckon with it then, keep its agony in place. There was something close to dignity about the bird—as though it could be believed that it had come to a place of acceptance of its fate. That it was doing its utmost to die a dignified, stoic death. Two other women, random pedestrians, had stopped alongside Claire to stare down at the injured …