When I mention how I don’t want to think about last winter, my husband says, “Why, what happened last winter?”

Every time they got together, it was like this. The sister would go and visit the brother in their hometown, or the brother would come and see the sister in her college town.

The notice came in the mail on Tuesday, but it remained sitting beside the refrigerator, resting, ignored, like a piece of partly burned cake.

The man stands on the same street corner near the wire garbage can every day. He never sits or squats or leans. He is a pole, planted on the corner like a reminder of something. The four and five and ten story fringes of the city huddle above the storefronts.

Sitting in bed this morning, wrapped in our blue and white sheets, I can see through the window the exact spot in the yard where I plan to build the studio. It will be our club house where I can paint and you can write and we can make love when the house is buzzing with children in the afternoons.

Relating all this to students yesterday, I actually admitted, in one of those lucid, light-switch moments that tend to spark upon reflection, that it’s exhausting, frankly, maintaining this Santa fantasy.

He lay in the center of a big pentagram she’d traced with her fingernail into the heavy pile of her bedroom rug, black candles lit at each of its five points. Cynthia half expected him to roll onto his back and start mewling for belly rubs.

If I were you, I would pack my bags and leave this place. I would not pack everything: I would select a certain number of the most important items. I would cancel my cell phone, because carrying a cell phone is not leaving.

Chekhov left stories, reminding Popeline Magrath that kindness was the raison d’être.

It was a humid day when the elephant came. I was twelve, Latika was thirteen. The mahout helped us settle on the top after my Grandma gave him ten rupees. Sitting on the red velvet howdah, we faced each other. Grandma walked back to the house, her right arm still up, waving.

Outside of the borders of our town, to the west, there lives a witch, in a ranch by a lake where no one ever goes. The boys watch her, lying on their stomachs behind the bushes, gravel biting their knees, dust clinging to their eyelashes.