I'm in love with a robot, but he doesn't know. Yesterday morning when he brought me my coffee, I dropped a less subtle hint, something about pressing each other's buttons. But it didn't register. Or if it did, he is playing hard to get. Why should this one be any different? Maybe it wasn't the best idea to name him Rosie, but that's Hanna-Barbera conditioning for you. The warranty says I'm good until next June, so I suppose I could register the unrequited feelings as a defect in workmanship, but I don't know that it would fly. Rosie in all...

Ridiculous. Absurd. Absolutely and beyond all normal standards of decency, indecent. That was how I looked in the mirror the morning that I discovered my first gray hair. Or was it my third. I was faced with the overwhelming reality of a head of lustrous, youth-infused auburnness marred by the upright and wiry soldier who insisted on taking up some precious real estate in my brain that could have been much better utilized by a sudoku puzzle or a cure for cancer. How were things now to possibly proceed in a direction other than graveward? What was the sense in...

There's somebody standing in the corner of my room. I can't see him, but I know he is there, and yes, it is a he. The collar of his shirt flaps soft with the night air, and the breadth of his hands dwarfs the whole space. I don't move, but it's not because I'm scared. I just don't want him to know that I know. That he's there. I don't want him to leave. His keeping watch while I sleep, a sort of volunteer sentryman, comforts me like my father's stroking my hair. Maybe it was my father who dispatched...

The conversation lasted two words: "Never again." They said it at the same time as they exited the restaurant. Why had the waiter insisted on swaying them away from the salmon and toward the tough lamb? Was it deliberate? Did he know this was a make-it-or-break-it meal and was itching to break something, anything? Did he glean from their terse looks that something dire was already on their horizon, and while the kids were asleep, the exorbitant sitter keeping watch, they were out to rehash the missteps that had brought them here? Had the waiter's ex-wife just taken him for...