Amelia Gray: AM/PM

“You’re easily distracted,” Martha said. “You can’t stop to see the good in people.”

“There’s plenty good,” Emily said, watching the man cross the street.

“You say that now, but you can’t even see the good here. Most people die alone yet here we are, together. If you were holding me right while this gas station blew up and took us with it, we couldn’t be closer.” She placed her hand on Emily’s knee.

Emily stared at the hand. “You’re insane.”

“Let’s take it slow,” Martha said, reaching for the elastic band on Emily’s stocking. Black smoke poured thickly from the windows and doors, from the ventilation hoods on the roof. Emily felt something that wasn’t entirely fear.

During his time as a hermit, Simon lived upstairs from two newlyweds. They rarely cooked, and when they did, things burned. They made love at two or three in the morning most nights, and then one of them — the girl, Simon imagined — got up and took a shower. He thought of the girl in the shower, all of twenty-three, freshly displaced from her parents’ home in Colorado, taking a shower in her downstairs apartment in Texas that she shared with her husband. Simon imagined she lathered her hair with unscented shampoo and repeated the phrase: My husband.

Through the trees under her window, June could just barely make out the swimming pool. She had never seen anyone in it, but every day, two rottweilers took a lap around it. They loped around casually, not looking for anything in particular. The water shimmered. It was hot outside, and the people who owned the pool would probably be down there enjoying it if they weren’t at work, earning money to pay off the pool. June wondered if it was better to be at work, paying off a pool, or at home, watching the dogs run.

Carla woke up, still drunk, and surrounded by Supreme Court justices. Ruth Bader Ginsberg was retching in the toilet. Antonin Scalia was wearing Carla’s underwear. Senior members of appellate courts were passed out in bizarre positions, splayed across her kitchen floor. She was frightened and disoriented.

She got herself up and ate two gas pills, two sneezing pills, a vitamin pill and a tablespoon of oil and you know what Carla did? She got herself a job.

Frances needed a man she could sink her life into. The perfect man, she observed, would like her but not really enjoy her friends, and the feeling would be mutual. She and her perfect man would eventually stop going to their friends for advice. They would eventually see each other only, and one morning, they would wake up to find that they had fused together, just slightly, at the upper-thigh. The fusion would not be uncomfortable, and would allow for some level of privacy for each. The days of uncertainty, and annoyance, and misunderstanding, would not be entirely over, but whenever such feelings arose, Frances or her perfect man would simply reach to their thigh area and gently pluck the shared skin like a harp string.

The insomnia had a calming effect on Reginald, who was accustomed by then to the disappointment of lying awake in bed. At night, small things came to the forefront. The metal cord on the ceiling fan made a rhythmic tapping noise. He made a mental note to pick up a balance kit from the store.

Squirrels ran down their corridors from the attic and into the plumbing behind the bathtub, avoiding the traps Reginald had set for them. The sounds comforted him and kept him awake. If the walls could talk, they would say, Help! There are squirrels in my brain!

Those infants have a right to privacy. They may be infants now, tumbling about in their onesies while the rest of us have to work to make a living, but pretty soon they’re going to be cogitating, speaking, members of society, and who are you to draw a line in the sandbox between infant rights and human rights?

The causeway had an erosion problem and the monument maker had extra stones. The city manager saw an opportunity. At the water’s edge, the tombstones made a somber beach. The stones were largely production errors — misspelled names and cracked bevels. A few of the stones belonged to the unlucky deceased who couldn’t afford the final payments. Loved ones could visit the watery memorial garden, if they so chose. Most did not.

Are you growing mistrustful of others? Do you suspect your wife does not actually have cancer? Is every trip to the mailbox an exercise in loathing and remorse? Are your coworkers having trouble finding anything interesting to say when they talk about you behind your back? Do you deeply despise people who possess many of the same opinions and motives as your own?

Tess wouldn’t give everything up for Wallace. She found the sentiment behind that statement to be a little tired, a little oversimplified. She had given things up, but if someone had placed the option in front of her and made it perfectly clear, you’re giving this up for that man , she would have said, no, I’m not, don’t be foolish, I’d give nothing for him when he’s given nothing in return. What she didn’t know was, love doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t trade one-for-one. Tess didn’t yet know it takes until you have nothing left, until it feels like the blood in your body doesn’t have the energy for a whole circuit.

Lifting a heavy box of files had injured Carla’s back. She sat hunched at her desk, feeling foolish, wondering if old age had finally caught up. Her daughters were grown, and though the men who pursued her did plenty to make her feel like a kid in college, she could see the graying around their temples, the odd areas of slackening skin that matched her own.

They all went out together to the railroad tracks to see the funeral train roll by. Martha and Hazel were pushing each other because they were just kids, and they gained a distinct pleasure from standing next to the tracks without getting yelled at, a pleasure which could be best expressed in meanness. Martha pulled one of the pigtails that Hazel spent so long getting even with the other. So Hazel dug her fingers into Martha’s arm and Martha squealed and Carla hauled back and smacked the two of them so hard they nearly fell off the backside of the embankment. She looked back at them with an incredible anger that Hazel and Martha would not understand until they were much older.

Olivia sees a butter knife on the banister atop the stairs. She fantasizes wildly about the ways in which it might plunge into the ones she loves.

The butter knife makes the entire room feel dangerous. An intruder might not have any desire to stab her until he reached the top of the stairs and felt the butter knife under his hand. Olivia cannot go on until she collects the butter knife and puts it in the sink, where it belongs.

Ask yourself: If you were sitting on a girl’s couch, and you realized the couch smelled like urine, would your first impulse be to wonder if you were the one who created the urine? Would you feel a sudden sense of guilt, like you didn’t belong on the couch at all, and once she came back out of the bathroom, she would take a rolled-up newspaper and swat your ass until you slunk, whimpering, to her open hand? What we’re saying here is men are dogs.

To clean a couch, one must first mix an enzyme cleaner with soap, and then use a clean towel or rag to scrub the soapy water into the couch. After a significant amount of cleaning, one then rinses the towel, refills the bucket with hot, clean water, and scrubs anew, removing soap and residue. Depending on the remaining visibility and odor of the stain, another pass may be necessary with soap and rag, water and rag. It may be necessary to pause between treatments, or to allow the soap mixture to soak into the material. What we’re saying here is our lives are furniture.