Tillie Treadwell

On a stretch of West Peak in the last weeks of May, where the path narrows and the basalt drops away, a small short-haired black dog appears at the edge of a hiker's vision, paces alongside them for a little, and is not there anymore. The body sometimes registers the cliff edge a half-beat before the eye has caught up, and the dog often arrives in that half-beat. What I have been turning over for some time, with this case and with cases of its kind, is whether the dog acts the way it acts on...

A pair of traditional, at- minimum- vintage salt and pepper shakers sat on a shelf in a multi-generational Latino household in the spring of 2015, and the household had begun, slowly at first and then all at once, to come undone around them. Spoons fell from counters with no hand near them. A picture frame turned a quarter inch on the wall in the night. Doors that nobody had touched eased open and eased shut, and the youngest children began waking with scratches on the parts of the back that...

My grandmother's house held a clock I knew from the inside before I knew it from the outside. It hung on a wall in a dining room furnished the way German immigrant homes of that generation were furnished, every surface holding something, every shelf carrying a purpose, the cuckoo clock above the sideboard in the quiet corner of the dining room ticking with the steady carved-and-painted patience of a piece of the Black Forest that had been mounted in an American room and never quite stopped...