A Doll’s Premonition

        One day a doll finally drank the tea the child poured for her. Before, the tea had always dribbled off the doll’s polymer lips. 
     Tepid, thought the doll, though she wasn’t quite sure what tepid meant. Suddenly her little doll body began to tingle like never before.
        Across from the doll the child, who was really too large to be sitting at such a small table, barked something the doll didn’t understand.
       Then it was as if all her dollness were gathering within her, and she saw the child pass from birth to death, saw all the joys and horrors it would experience, and that her own life henceforth would also be empty and endless …

Waiting for Winter

Light slants through the window, a leaf falls, the train whistles as it departs the station. On this train a man in a gray overcoat, exhausted after another week in the office, his briefcase on the seat beside him, has slept through his stop. In his dream his wife and dog are greeting him upon his return, but he has no wife, and his dog is a pile of bones gathering dust behind the kitchen door. The stops on the line come and go. Passengers depart, none get on. On the seat beside the man, a mouse gnaws its way out of the briefcase.