It wasn’t an actual snake, though. It was the person who had been sleeping next to me for almost 15 years. I had begun to suspect something was wrong when money came up missing from our shared accounts without a good reason, when he was constantly changing plans, when his social media said he was in Chicago when he was actually in LA.

He had gotten smarter-he blocked me on social media, and start...

Could it be? How could the woman next to me on the bus really be that happy? She was sunshine incarnate, her joy spilling over onto everyone around her. It was magical-no other word for it. She got off at the next intersection, leaving behind a sparkle that I took with me into my joy-sucking 9-5 in a grimy office building a few blocks down.

I didn’t see her again for several weeks, and by that ti...

His last text haunted me: 41st and Vincennes! Help! I knew it as a decent neighborhood in a formerly gritty part of town. So I drove down in a pouring rain, cursing the drivers who kept trying to cut me off.

Once I arrived, I got out of the car to look around. That’s when I got my first clue to his possible whereabouts: a pathfinder’s sign in a vacant lot “pointing due north, and a souvenir coin ...

The familiar places we once loved

Are alien, otherworldly

The things we knew most deeply

Are weird shadows of themselves

Our favorite song echoes in an off key

The food we loved tastes dry and bland

All of this world seems to have changed, even though it somehow seems the same—

You are missing from my world,...