Phantoms

The first full-length prose piece in the Pushcart Prize collection is Phantoms by Steven Millhauser.
Let me start off by saying I LOVED this story. I actually started reading it before I realized it was assigned because it looked interesting, and I wasn't disappointed. This was right up my alley in term of fiction I like to read.
The way the story was divided into little chunks, talking about explanations for the phenomena or people's reactions, mostly sat fine with me, but its not my preferred way of reading something - I prefer linear when it comes to fiction. Thus, the case studies were my favorite parts to read, to learn about the people's different reactions to what's happening.
Our narrator is obviously someone who grew up in the town, and is now an adult with adult concerns about what's happening in the town. They're personally seems mostly unphased by the phantoms, but that just may be due to the way they're writing.
The mystery of the phantoms is never solved, and they're not explained by any rational or scientific means. They're just there. I love unanswered questions of that deal with fantasy elements. Just throw something randomly mystical into modern day with no explanation and that's something I'd read.
I'm sure the author wrote this as a metaphor for unanswerable things we encounter in modern life, like death or taxes or how headphones always become tangled, but I loved it as straight up fiction and I liked it that way.