Don’t give me anything, one sign says. Gifts are unacceptable and will be disposed of, asserts another. Pay no attention! The signs are held by a homeless woman on the subway, a heavily bundled figure who appears as interested in warding off charity as she is the cold, and the severity of her warnings are…

For his birthday, my father asks me to hypnotize him. “Just tell my body to tell itself to heal me,” he says. This sounds too complex a method to be undertaken by someone like me. I imagine that when I tell his body to heal itself, Dad’s insides will play a game of telephone, his…

1. Somewhere between growing up in farm country and leaving it, I watched my eight-year-old brother fall into a pile of afterbirth. One minute, we were poking the afterbirth with sticks—we couldn’t help ourselves, it was so strange, that pool of black milk, the recent discard of twin lambs—and the next minute, my brother was…