Excerpt from Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A familiar cold metal hand closes around my heart and squeezes: my mother is on her feet hour after hour, day after day, so that I will someday go to college. What an abundance of opportunities lies before me, for failure! Sitting on my mother's dressing table is a framed photo of a lovely girl. In this photo a heap of shining ringlets somewhat obscures the shape of the girl's head, but there are the distinctive, long, shiny-lidded eyes, their pale, nearly transparent disks of irises plausibly green though represented in black and white, with tiny, shocking dots at their centers. The expression, too, is well known to me, though the girl's suggests a mischievous rather than a malevolent irony.

It is hard to believe, but there is the evidence—always building to the same, ringing summation: a lack of advantages ate the lovely girl alive and emitted in her place someone shaped like a melting pyramid, on which is balanced a head—as wide and oval as my aunts' heads are long and oval— adorned at the ends with little frilly ears and topped now with a careful display of durable-looking, reddish curls, someone whose feet must sit in a basin.

I reach for my mother's hand and hold it tightly. "What's the matter with you?" she says, but she allows my hand to stay clasped around her fingers, even though it is clammy and disagreeable.

Flower to fruit to bare branch, sun to wan star—who am I to complain? The laws are the laws. I shake my head and clear a way for my answer. "Nothing

* * *

"Your cousin Morrie was a beautiful child. My first thought when I saw him with Adela was to wonder if he wasn't adopted. Ah, well—no one in that family need worry about being loved for beauty alone," my mother says, impressing upon me the power of euphemism. In fact my aunts, with their coarse black hair, narrow faces, huge, vivid features, and long legs extending elegantly from their bell-shaped furs, look nothing like the other people in our little city—the Polacks and Litvaks, my mother calls them.

* * *

"What is this ludicrous obsession with aliens from outer space?" my mother says. "I am not taking you to Women of the Prehistoric Planet, so you can just forget about that." Aliens from outer space, she tells me, are, like Santa Claus, the invention of people too fey, too shallow, or too fearful to grapple with reality, or who stand to profit.

Still, I reason, surely there's no way to be 100 percent certain, especially because any aliens who came to our planet would take care to look as much like humans as possible, though it would be logical that they would get things just a bit wrong.

Also, it would be rash to judge the intentions and purposes of aliens. There could be aliens among us who were sent only to observe, or even to help, not to meddle. Or—and these are the contingencies that seem most likely—aliens who escaped to the refuge of our planet from the terrors of their own or, conversely, who had been expelled, as a punishment, from the haven of their planet and condemned to the terrors of ours.

What is certain is that my aunts' house, which is draped in the shadows of the massive trees that surround it, has a stagey, provisional feel, as if it were an illusion produced by powerful, distant brainwaves, and I can't shake off the thought that the house dematerializes at night—its own form of sleep when its inhabitants are sleeping. I understand that the house is made of brick rather than brainwaves—it just has to be—but still, I brood about it: Hypothetically, what would the point of the illusion be? It would be ... to get you to think that some particular thing was real, or else to get you to think that some particular thing was not real.

I once tried to describe to Mary Margaret, who had just

Excerpted from "Cross Off and Move On" (pages 73-83), one of the stories in Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg. Copyright © 2018 by Deborah Eisenberg. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.