Each docked boat
is tattooed across its bow:

Cinnamon Girl, Hazel B,
Lady Lou, Miner’s Debt.

Low mountains
encircle the marina, the rock

And snow of each peak
patched like molting caribou.

VANESSA VILCHES NORAT
Last night, as I was waiting for him, I poked my head into the hole and saw a puddle. I hadn’t noticed it before. I decided to clean it up, so I took a broom to the stagnant water. Snails and moss had taken over the tunnel walls. A swarm of mosquitoes inhabited the pond.

I think it’s right to talk about it this way, that such stories keep a kind of territory, and you have to come into that territory to have them. They extend outward, too, beyond both place and time, the places and times such stories are made.

After the wind, a man named Chuck died lying on the ice next to the fuel pump at the Phillips 66 off I-80 on the east side of Rawlins, Wyoming.

Coming down the mountain from the McDonald Observatory under a hail of starshine and black night—the darkest sky in the lower 48 states—the universe went on expanding around us, my companion and me.

Stand here, traveler. You have come a long way. Beyond this fence, something happened.

ALA JANBEK
After a year and a half in the neighborhood, I no longer wonder if I should buy a snack from the red shop or the blue one; instead, I buy from Abu Hussein, who throws in a date and a walnut for free (because you can’t eat a date by itself).

YARA GHUNAIM
Every day, on my way to work, I make a bet with myself: Will I find the tree—the one next to the Own the Apartment of a Lifetime! sign—still standing in the same place? When we’re together in the car, my mother wonders aloud: “My God, when did that building come up?” I imagine the buildings sprouting up from the earth, like plants.

KOMAL DHRUV
While the credits roll, Raj and Simran take the train to Amritsar International Airport. No one flinches at his bloodied face–they’ve all seen stranger things on these commutes. The couple returns to London, buys a flat with their parents’ money, sets up house.

OLGA ZILBERBOURG
Wilson’s novel, too, is a carnivalesque feast. It offers a constant spectacle of death and renewal in exuberant, entirely over-the-top settings. Most characters have a tragic death story attached to them. There are deaths in car crashes, fires, several forms of cancer, and an epileptic girl who dies from an attack of epilepsy that happens when she’s in prison.