Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The babysitter has agreed again to feed the rabbits, the guinea pig, the bird, and even Michael's snake, which requires her to dangle defrosted mice on the end of a stick. Of the menagerie, only Kelsey comes with us, most unruly of all, and object of the children's keenest ridicule and devotion. Their untrained mutt of a mascot, who plows through window screens and shits on beds, though I still love her through their eyes.

For the long drive I make them surprise boxes, which I hold back until we're halfway there, giving them something to look forward to and buying me a half hour's peace once they're doled out. The shoe boxes are full of license-plate games, peanuts, and oranges, a little Lego set for Alec, a book for Celia, and a music magazine for Michael. I have to finish putting them together now before they come downstairs or the effect will be lost, and I manage it just a minute before Alec appears in the kitchen asking, What's for breakfast?

He's followed by Michael, who walks straight up to his little brother, squeezes his upper arm until Alec cries out for him to stop, and says, "Mom's in a preparatory mode which means Dad will cook and he only cooks Viennese eggs so that's what's for breakfast, you little thing."

Michael and Celia both treat Alec as akin to Kelsey on the evolutionary scale, a reliable entertainment when properly goaded.

"That hurt," Alec says, clutching his arm, but Michael's not listening. He's at the radio changing the station, flying over news, violins, shouted ads, Dolly Parton, and rock ballads, up the dial and back down again three or four times before he settles on a disco song, his favorite music of late.

"Please," I say, "not now."

"We can't listen to any more baroque music. It enervates the mind. We need a beat."

Where does a twelve-year-old get "enervates the mind"? From some novel he's reading, no doubt. Beguiled by the sound of the phrase, he'll repeat it for a week before latching onto the next one. He tries them out at the dinner table, usually on Alec, who at seven has no recourse that doesn't confirm his siblings' conviction that he's stupid. "I believe you have delighted us long enough," Michael said the other night, as Alec tried explaining how the teams worked on field day at school. Michael waited a diplomatic second or two before glancing surreptitiously at John and me to see how we'd reacted to his bon mot. Alec kept on about sack racing, until Michael once more pinched his arm.

"Not now," I say, so he turns the dial back to whatever it is Robert J. Lurtsema is playing this morning on WGBH, and opens the screen door to let a wheedling Kelsey into the yard, following her out.

The sun's been up more than two hours already—5:17 this morning, a minute later than yesterday—and is already well above the tops of the pines. Finches and sparrows flutter in the square of the birdbath, which sits atilt in my bed of marigolds. It's a rather ugly object made of coarse concrete, and it looks forlorn in winter holding askew its dome of snow, but this morning with the splashing birds making its water glisten it's a perfectly pleasant part of the mild shabbiness of the place—the barn with the collapsed rear roof that we have to constantly remind the children they're not allowed to play under, and the gently crumbling brick patio, where I've got the morning glories blooming up the drainpipe, their petals crinkled like linen around their dusty yellow centers.

Kelsey has lit off down the path into the woods—that'll be another fifteen minutes—but Michael's declined to follow, instead stopping at the station wagon, where he's stepped onto the bumper, and, holding the roof rack, is bouncing the car up and down on its rear wheels, as if it were a beast he could coax into forward motion.

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.