This story is a fresh take on the proverbial phrase: go the extra mile for someone else. 

It starts like this, the saddest story I know does. It starts with me and it starts with my son.

Nest of resin and surf wax among blood

“You’re damned if you do and damned if you won’t”

Jack Beauregard divides his time into zeroes and ones. He divides his time between mundane tasks and the question of whether he is worth loving. 

The ferry man asked, Where is its mom? I am his mother!

We go to a bar for lunch that serves free candy.

This D minus of a man

I got a flat tire last month and my life spiraled out of control just a half mile from the rest stop.

I am a hoarder trying to salvage pieces.

Jared punches like dang. Gouges, arm-bars. Breaks windows at theme parties.

Is it ok to bite the hand that feeds you if the food is mostly rubber?

For the past month Wrat, a man removed from the dogtooth of language, had been hearing a scratching, needling noise clip the outmost walls.

I put on underpants and pants and socks and shirts in the same sequence every day

I was retroactively making a story out of a time in my life when I was interested in writing, wanted to ‘be a writer’, but didn’t necessarily have the skills or direction to actually pull it off.

When he sees me seeing him, he starts to cry.

Do you think

you’ll be around for dinner tonight?

Susan’s making shepherd’s pie.

On the job site one morning they found a dead squirrel. There was no indication of what had killed it.

In theory, Hell in winter must be great.

But the true malevolence of Majka’s world—the thing that traps her characters in a state of lifelong discontent—most often manifests in mundane hauntings: regret and remorse, vanished love and vanished youth, feelings of dislocation and the inability to belong

I understand this. This is what made me psychic. This is what makes images arrive on the doorstep with a bindle over the shoulder made of red bandana. Each man is the last man.

When my team scores a touchdown, I have a few seconds in the spotlight to do my dance, to captivate the crowd. I pretend in front of my flock that I don’t enjoy it but I do. I am more vain than I let on

a glass/ bottle containing/ the letter I/ wrote: it starts/ with the birthday/ of your first/ born

I’d’ve led him by the wrist. Still but blinding four pm/ back home blazed against the glass.

II. 
A girl and a girl are in love or planning to be.

Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.