The air in the bedroom sags with mist that won’t touch anything. It hangs around the built-in bed, and stationary lamp, and my sisters and Ma. I can’t be in there. The noises are terrible, and the haze smells like evergreens. It makes me homesick.

Mother is sitting in the kitchen with the Bible and a fresh stack of paper. A cigarette smokes in the ashtray and the sink is full of dishes. “It’s not what you think,” I whisper to the boy I have brought home. Later I will suck his thoughts dry. 

Family Album, Romance and Circumstantial Evidence

Inside the restaurant two beams of sunlight hit Spencer’s table at seemingly impossible angles. They meet on his butter dish, which has a single olive pit in it. It seems like outside the sun could be doubled.

It’s not unheard of now for people to be replaced by look-alikes.  Troubled people, mostly.  Unhappy people.  

I have stolen this prayer from my friend Giancarlo Ditrapano.  

I went to the Antiques Roadshow with my mother’s green marble frog in the inside pocket of the jacket of the black suit I wore to her funeral that morning. I had taken the frog from her house. I wanted to know what it was worth. 

Somebody has replaced my chair with a child. It was a beautiful chair. A rocking chair fashioned by my father.

It makes no sense.

Though, of course, one mustn’t give credence to anything in

My girlfriend moved out. She gave me back the lease the next day. “I’m not sorry,” she said, but she agreed to stay for afternoon coffee. We sat by the window. The coffeepot gurgled.

“I want a

My sister once saw Meryl Streep naked in a public shower. It was back around 1980 and they were somewhere near Virginia Beach. Meryl Streep was already famous, just not yet Meryl Streep. Stacey, my

It was a freely made decision, a public vote, so I suppose one could argue that when I confronted my roommate and started an argument-- in between squat thrusts, jumping jacks and the occasional

Every summer my father and I would make the drive to the ghost town of Lundy near the Nevada border to fish the lake there. We’d wake early and get doughnuts at 7-11 and drive and every five

You are driving home from a place that makes its own beer, where it seemed wrong to order just a few because this is a small business and small businesses, you know, are failing all over the

It was a difficult job for the man who painted night.  First off, he always stained his clothes.  An occupational hazard, and Frank supposed he could wear an apron, but when he arched his back,

Leo and I are dicking around in his room after school when I pull this big cardboard box out of the closet.

—What is this? I ask.

—That’s my card catalogue, Leo says.

—Is this every

Mom. Dad. Where have you been? Everyone else is already here. You missed the first prelim bout. I'll catch you up: Siyar Bahadurzada won by tap out in the second due to rear-naked choke. What? No,

Sometime during the last two hours, Clark Griswold has stopped feeling cold.

He claws at the frozen ground, vaguely aware of the intensifying blizzard. Snow replaces the dirt he shovels between

Across the street, I see a large, jolly-looking man with a white beard and white hair leaving the house of our friends, David and Shelby. The man is wearing camouflage – the jacket, hat and hip waders of a duck hunter.

At nearly two in the morning, in the room across the hall from where his wife slept, Geoff Devine was awake, gazing down at the above ground pool in the backyard. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew that within the giant wooden drum, the murky water reflected the light of the moon. 

When I was fourteen my mother moved into an apartment across town with my principal, Mr. Lorenzo, who was rumored to keep a pistol strapped beneath his dress slacks. My younger sister, Caroline,

In jest you call for your horse, but there is no horse. It’s a bright lettuce-green morning, birds piping overhead. You are on foot, and follow the derelict tracks out of town past the Shell Station.  You step off the road and onto a furry plain of high golden weeds and yellow dross. This is strange. 

It only glows if I believe in God. Of course, the Fat Man doesn’t know that. Once an hour he comes into the barn waving his short black club, threatening to cut off my carrot supply. I sulk into

Lyle worked the night shift in a millwork factory, manning a machine nicknamed the Pincher.  Everyone hated the Pincher.  On the day shift they kept going through operators.  Before Lyle, the longest anyone else had lasted on the Pincher was two years.  At least that was how the story went.  Lyle hated the Pincher too, but he’d learned to live with it.  He’d been there nine years and would be there another nine if they let him.  By then he’d have enough saved up for a nice house, one with stairs and a workbench and actual carpeting. 

100k

He said that he got a letter from a used car dealership that said that he either won 100k or a grill. He said he knew it was bullshit and he would come over, but he had to leave in the

Two queens walk out of a bar and light a cigarette, me and Lucy Littlefist. Lucy says this. She says, “In a relationship,” she traces quotation marks in the air around the word, “one of you always loves the other more.” And she’s right. She secures her wig with another bobby pin, pulls at her sequined dress.