The trouble with paddling is your arms get tired. I tell this to the girls but they don’t listen.

Call brother Henry in Louisville. Tell him to call baby sister Clementine in Augusta.

Once, all foxes were silver.

1.   It was always ice. Ice: a word like a shard of glass shived in his ribs. The dark plain he was bound to travel. His paramour, his nightmare, his lost thumb. His vice.

You are a diagnostician, alert for symptoms: ridged fingernails, yellow eye-whites, swollen knuckles, broken capillaries. 

Our town’s ordinance—passed in 1862—named the first-born son of each family Zebulon.

My ex, Mark, calls me at two in the morning to tell me he’s figured out what’s causing his problems.

When one didn’t work, turned to another one. Turned to one who could be spun.

Turned and spun.

That the language of business.

What other language would he—would any of

Thank you for agreeing to serve as my culture champion. I appreciate you.

Defenestrated again. On the way down I regret that it isn’t raining.

Ed's note: This story originally ran on Hobart in 2010. In celebration of the upcoming publication of Andrew Brininstool's book, Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession, in which this story

Four decades after breaking off our high school romance, we found each other again, I, Phillip, twenty-five years into my second marriage, and I, Lily, divorced.

Toby was blind. He was different. We left him alone.

The fact that it happened at the town's polar bear research station is irrelevant. A polar bear didn't kill the child.

The parents were not without greed, and so the younger painted, and as she painted the painting changed. 

On the night I left your apartment, my phone died.

“I’m helping you get in touch with your heritage,” Susana said to Tom, foisting the grocery bag onto the counter.  She pulled the tub of sour cream out, along with a ziploc bag of cheddar cheese

What I could buy with the insurance money they gave me when you died:

One Ferrari, red or black, assuming V-8 instead of V-12, assuming premium gas, assuming insurance, assuming no major

I’m in Tom's apartment staring at the big deer head he has hanging on the wall of his living room. Tom has a small place and the deer head looks enormous. Some kind of giant, mutant deer, like it's

She asks me to tell her a story. Almost every night she can’t sleep. I’m no storyteller, I’ll say, and at first I would start off with robots and fantastic bears, trying to make my own Where the

I am driving through the hill country when I spot up ahead, in the dip between two hills, this young buck with his thumb out, sleeveless, flaunting the white underside of a supple tanned bicep

I was wearing white lipstick when I pressed a kiss onto the dirty window in the back corner of his mother’s garage, pasting spider silk and bone-colored dust to the glass. I left that mark to be

The girl you spent a whole summer watching Beverly Hills 90210 and eating McDonald’s lunches with ran up behind you, taking hold of your backpack.

I ran into myself at the grocery store the other day. The store had just run out of Cookie Crisp cereal. The worst part was that I'd gone to the store specifically to get the cereal, along with

I start working in the bakery because I think of it as romantic. I count each sugared donut while composing hypothetical letters to past lovers – half-invented, half-remembered.

Last night was