So much goes on without it baffles every time I begin. I read, I go walking. I take long routes past the elementary school, the fidgety, nebulous line at the crosswalk and the swingsets quaking and singing.

The coroner is piecing together the tale of the pair in his possession. / As if their corpses are jigsaw puzzles laid out on a wooden table...

As long as I have been old enough to understand what the middle class is, it has been described as “shrinking.”

She says, Maybe I am not, in fact, ill. The ends of all her sentences curve upward into questions. We reduce her medication with a warning: Bipolar I is a lifetime diagnosis, though we concede that perhaps Patient could do with a smaller dosage.